Atlas Shrugged

CHAPTER I ATLANTIS

When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man’s face. She thought: I know what this is. This was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen—and now she had reached it—and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.

She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn—yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen, or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes—he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world—to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness—yet she had never been so aware of a man’s body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous: his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal.

He was looking down at her with the faint trace of a smile, it was not a look of discovery, but of familiar contemplation—as if he, too, were seeing the long-expected and the never-doubted.

This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence—and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone’s senseless joke. She smiled at him, as at a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again. He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and knew what she meant.

“We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” she whispered.

“No, we never had to.”

And then, her consciousness returning fully, she realized that this man was a total stranger.

She tried to draw away from him, but it was only a faint movement of her head on the grass she felt under her hair. She tried to rise.

A shot of pain across her back threw her down again.

“Don’t move, Miss Taggart. You’re hurt.”

“You know me?” Her voice was impersonal and hard.

“I’ve known you for many years.”

“Have I known you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“What is your name?”

“John Galt.”

She looked at him, not moving.

“Why are you frightened?” he asked.

“Because I believe it.”

He smiled, as if grasping a full confession of the meaning she attached to his name; the smile held an adversary’s acceptance of a challenge—and an adult’s amusement at the self-deception of a child.

She felt as if she were returning to consciousness after a crash that had shattered more than an airplane. She could not reassemble the pieces now, she could not recall the things she had known about his name, she knew only that it stood for a dark vacuum which she would slowly have to fill. She could not do it now, this man was too blinding a presence, like a spotlight that would not let her see the shapes strewn in the outer darkness.

“Was it you that I was following?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She glanced slowly around her. She was lying in the grass of a field at the foot of a granite drop that came down from thousands of feet away in the blue sky. On the other edge of the field, some crags and pines and the glittering leaves of birch trees hid the space that stretched to a distant wall of encircling mountains. Her plane was not shattered—it was there, a few feet away, flat on its belly in the grass. There was no other plane in sight, no structures, no sign of human habitation.

“What is this valley?” she asked.

He smiled, “The Taggart Terminal.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll find out.”

A dim impulse, like the recoil of an antagonist, made her want to check on what strength was left to her. She could move her arms and legs; she could lift her head; she felt a stabbing pain when she breathed deeply; she saw a thin thread of blood running down her stocking.

“Can one get out of this place?” she asked.

His voice seemed earnest, but the glint of the metal-green eyes was a smile: “Actually—no. Temporarily—yes.”

She made a movement to rise. He bent to lift her, but she gathered her strength in a swift, sudden jolt and slipped out of his grasp, struggling to stand up. “I think I can—” she started saying, and collapsed against him the instant her feet rested on the ground, a stab of pain shooting up from an ankle that would not hold her.

He lifted her in his arms and smiled. “No, you can’t, Miss Taggart,” he said, and started off across the field.

She lay still, her arms about him, her head on his shoulder, and she thought: For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel... When had she experienced it before?—she wondered; there had been a moment when these had been the words in her mind, but she could not remember it now. She had known it, once—this feeling of certainty, of the final, the reached, the not-to-be-questioned. But it was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender—right, because this peculiar sense of safety was not protection against the future, but against the past, not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength... Aware with abnormal intensity of the pressure of his hands against her body, of the gold and copper threads of his hair, the shadows of his lashes on the skin of his face a few inches away from hers, she wondered dimly: Protected, from what?... it’s he who was the enemy... was he?... why?... She did not know, she could not think of it now. It took an effort to remember that she had had a goal and a motive a few hours ago. She forced herself to recapture it.

“Did you know that I was following you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Where is your plane?”

“At the landing field.”

“Where is the landing field?”

“On the other side of the valley.”

“There was no landing field in this valley, when I looked down, There was no meadow, either. How did it get here?”

He glanced at the sky. “Look carefully. Do you see anything up there?”

She dropped her head back, looking straight into the sky, seeing nothing but the peaceful blue of morning. After a while she distinguished a few faint strips of shimmering air.

“Heat waves,” she said.

“Refractor rays,” he answered. “The valley bottom that you saw is a mountain top eight thousand feet high, five miles away from here.”

“A... what?”

“A mountain top that no flyer would ever choose for a landing.

What you saw was its reflection projected over this valley.”

“How?”

“By the same method as a mirage on a desert: an image refracted from a layer of heated air.”

“How?”

“By a screen of rays calculated against everything—except a courage such as yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never thought that any plane would attempt to drop within seven hundred feet of the ground. You hit the ray screen. Some of the rays are the kind that kill magnetic motors. Well, that’s the second time you beat me: I’ve never been followed, either.”

“Why do you keep that screen?”

“Because this place is private property intended to remain as such.”

“What is this place?”

“I’ll show it to you, now that you’re here, Miss Taggart. I’ll answer questions after you’ve seen it.”

She remained silent. She noticed that she had asked questions about every subject, but not about him. It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.

He was carrying her down a narrow trail that went winding to the bottom of the valley. On the slopes around them, the tall, dark pyramids of firs stood immovably straight, in masculine simplicity, like sculpture reduced to an essential form, and they clashed with the complex, feminine, over detailed lace-work of the birch leaves trembling in the sun.

The leaves let the sunrays fall through to sweep across his hair, across both their faces. She could not see what lay below, beyond the turns of the trail.

Her eyes kept coming back to his face. He glanced down at her once in a while. At first, she looked away, as if she had been caught.

Then, as if learning it from him, she held his glance whenever he chose to look down—knowing that he knew what she felt and that he did not hide from her the meaning of his glance.

She knew that his silence was the same confession as her own. He did not hold her in the impersonal manner of a man carrying a wounded woman. It was an embrace, even though she felt no suggestion of it in his bearing; she felt it only by means of her certainty that his whole body was aware of holding hers.

She heard the sound of the waterfall before she saw the fragile thread that fell in broken strips of glitter down the ledges. The sound came through some dim beat in her mind, some faint rhythm that seemed no louder than a struggling memory—but they went past and the beat remained; she listened to the sound of the water, but another sound seemed to grow clearer, rising, not in her mind, but from somewhere among the leaves. The trail turned, and in a sudden clearing she saw a small house on a ledge below, with a flash of sun on the pane of an open window. In the moment when she knew what experience had once made her want to surrender to the immediate present—it had been the night in a dusty coach of the Comet, when she had heard the theme of Halley’s Fifth Concerto for the first time—she knew that she was hearing it now, hearing it rise from the keyboard of a piano, in the clear, sharp chords of someone’s powerful, confident touch.

She snapped the question at his face, as if hoping to catch him unprepared: “That’s the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“When did he write it?”

“Why don’t you ask him that in person?”

“Is he here?”

“It’s he who’s playing it. That’s his house.”

“Oh... !”

“You’ll meet him, later. He’ll be glad to speak to you. He knows that his works are the only records you like to play, in the evening, when you are alone.”

“How does he know that?”

“I told him.”

The look on her face was like a question that would have begun with “How in hell... ?”—but she saw the look of his eyes, and she laughed, her laughter giving sound to the meaning of his glance.

She could not question anything, she thought, she could not doubt, not now—not with the sound of that music rising triumphantly through the sun-drenched leaves, the music of release, of deliverance, played as it was intended to be played, as her mind had struggled to hear it in a rocking coach through the beat of wounded wheels—it was this that her mind had seen in the sounds, that night—this valley and the morning sun and—And then she gasped, because the trail had turned and from the height of an open ledge she saw the town on the floor of the valley.

It was not a town, only a cluster of houses scattered at random from the bottom to the rising steps of the mountains that went on rising above their roofs, enclosing them within an abrupt, impassable circle.

They were homes, small and new, with naked, angular shapes and the glitter of broad windows. Far in the distance, some structures seemed taller, and the faint coils of smoke above them suggested an industrial district. But close before her, rising on a slender granite column from a ledge below to the level of her eyes, blinding her by its glare, dimming the rest, stood a dollar sign three feet tall, made of solid gold. It hung in space above the town, as its coat-of-arms, its trademark, its beacon—and it caught the sunrays, like some transmitter of energy that sent them in shining blessing to stretch horizontally through the air above the roofs, “What’s that?” she gasped, pointing at the sign.

“Oh, that’s Francisco’s private joke.”

“Francisco—who?” she whispered, knowing the answer.

“Francisco d’Anconia.”

“Is he here, too?”

“He will be, any day now.”

“What do you mean, his joke?”

“He gave that sign as an anniversary present to the owner of this place. And then we all adopted it as our particular emblem. We liked the idea.”

“Aren’t you the owner of this place?”

“I? No.” He glanced down at the foot of the ledge and added, pointing, “There’s the owner of this place, coming now.”

A car had stopped at the end of a dirt road below, and two men were hurrying up the trail. She could not distinguish their faces; one of them was slender and tall, the other shorter, more muscular. She lost sight of them behind the twists of the trail, as he went on carrying her down to meet them.

She met them when they emerged suddenly from behind a rocky corner a few feet away. The sight of their faces hit her with the abruptness of a collision.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned!” said the muscular man, whom she did not know, staring at her.

She was staring at the tall, distinguished figure of his companion: it was Hugh Akston.

It was Hugh Akston who spoke first, bowing to her with a courteous smile of welcome. “Miss Taggart, this is the first time anyone has ever proved me wrong, I didn’t know—when I told you you’d never find him—that the next time I saw you, you would be in his arms.”

“In whose arms?”

“Why, the inventor of the motor.”

She gasped, closing her eyes; this was one connection she knew she should have made. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at Galt. He was smiling, faintly, derisively, as if he knew fully what this meant to her.

“It would have served you right if you’d broken your neck!” the muscular man snapped at her, with the anger of concern, almost of affection. “What a stunt to pull—for a person who’d have been admitted here so eagerly, if she’d chosen to come through the front door!”

“Miss Taggart, may I present Midas Mulligan?” said Galt.

“Oh,” she said weakly, and laughed; she had no capacity for astonishment any longer. “Do you suppose I was killed in that crash—and this is some other kind of existence?”

“It is another kind of existence,” said Galt. “But as for being killed, doesn’t it seem more like the other way around?”

“Oh yes,” she whispered, “yes...” She smiled at Mulligan. “Where is the front door?”

“Here,” he said, pointing to his forehead.

“I’ve lost the key,” she said simply, without resentment. “I’ve lost all keys, right now.”

“You’ll find them. But what in blazes were you doing in that plane?”

“Following.”

“Him?” He pointed at Galt.

“Yes.”

“You’re lucky to be alive! Are you badly hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ll have a few questions to answer, after they patch you up.” He turned brusquely, leading the way down to the car, then glanced at Galt. “Well, what do we do now? There’s something we hadn’t provided for: the first scab.”

“The first... what?” she asked.

“Skip it,” said Mulligan, and looked at Galt. “What do we do?”

“It will be my charge,” said Galt. “I will be responsible. You take Quentin Daniels.”

“Oh, he’s no problem at all. He needs nothing but to get acquainted with the place. He seems to know all the rest.”

“Yes. He had practically gone the whole way by himself.” He saw her watching him in bewilderment, and said, “There’s one thing I must thank you for, Miss Taggart: you did pay me a compliment when you chose Quentin Daniels as my understudy. He was a plausible one.”

“Where is he?” she asked. “Will you tell me what happened?”

“Why, Midas met us at the landing field, drove me to my house and took Daniels with him. I was going to join them for breakfast, but I saw your plane spinning and plunging for that pasture. I was the closest one to the scene.”

“We got here as fast as we could,” said Mulligan. “I thought he deserved to get himself killed—whoever was in that plane. I never dreamed that it was one of the only two persons in the whole world whom I’d exempt.”

“Who is the other one?” she asked.

“Hank Rearden.”

She winced; it was like a sudden blow from another great distance.

She wondered why it seemed to her that Galt was watching her face intently and that she saw an instant’s change in his, too brief to define.

They had come to the car. It was a Hammond convertible, its top down, one of the costliest models, some years old, but kept in the shining trim of efficient handling. Galt placed her cautiously in the back seat and held her in the circle of his arm. She felt a stabbing pain once in a while, but she had no attention to spare for it. She watched the distant houses of the town, as Mulligan pressed the starter and the car moved forward, as they went past the sign of the dollar and a golden ray hit her eyes, sweeping over her forehead.

“Who is the owner of this place?” she asked.

“I am,” said Mulligan.

“What is he?” She pointed to Galt.

Mulligan chuckled. “He just works here.”

“And you, Dr. Akston?” she asked.

He glanced at Galt, “I’m one of his two fathers, Miss Taggart. The one who didn’t betray him.”

“Oh!” she said, as another connection fell into place. “Your third pupil?”

“That’s right.”

“The second assistant bookkeeper!” she moaned suddenly, at one more memory.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what Dr. Stadler called him. That’s what Dr. Stadler told me he thought his third pupil had become.”

“He overestimated,” said Galt. “I’m much lower than that by the scale of his standards and of his world.”

The car had swerved into a lane rising toward a lonely house that stood on a ridge above the valley. She saw a man walking down a path, ahead of them, hastening in the direction of the town. He wore blue denim overalls and carried a lunchbox. There was something faintly familiar in the swift abruptness of his Galt. As the car went past him, she caught a glimpse of his face—and she jerked backward, her voice rising to a scream from the pain of the movement and from the shock of the sight: “Oh, stop! Stop! Don’t let him go!” It was Ellis Wyatt.

The three men laughed, but Mulligan stopped the car. “Oh...” she said weakly, in apology, realizing she had forgotten that this was the place from which Wyatt would not vanish.

Wyatt was running toward them: he had recognized her, too. When he seized the edge of the car, to brake his speed, she saw the face and the young, triumphant smile that she had seen but once before: on the platform of Wyatt Junction.

“Dagny! You, too, at last? One of us?”

“No,” said Galt. “Miss Taggart is a castaway.”

“What?”

“Miss Taggart’s plane crashed. Didn’t you see it?”

“Crashed—here?”

“Yes.”

“I heard a plane, but I...” His look of bewilderment changed to a smile, regretful, amused and friendly. “I see. Oh, hell, Dagny, it’s preposterous!”

She was staring at him helplessly, unable to reconnect the past to the present. And helplessly—as one would say to a dead friend, in a dream, the words one regrets having missed the chance to say in life—she said, with the memory of a telephone ringing, unanswered, almost two years ago, the words she had hoped to say if she ever caught sight of him again, “I... I tried to reach you.”

He smiled gently. “We’ve been trying to reach you ever since, Dagny.

... I’ll see you tonight. Don’t worry, I won’t vanish—and I don’t think you will, either.”

He waved to the others and went off, swinging his lunchbox. She glanced up, as Mulligan started the car, and saw Galt’s eyes watching her attentively. Her face hardened, as if in open admission of pain and in defiance of the satisfaction it might give him. “All right,” she said. “I see what sort of show you want to put me through the shock of witnessing.”

But there was neither cruelty nor pity in his face, only the level look of justice. “Our first rule here, Miss Taggart,” he answered, “is that one must always see for oneself.”

The car stopped in front of the lonely house. It was built of rough granite blocks, with a sheet of glass for most of its front wall. “I’ll send the doctor over,” said Mulligan, driving off, while Galt carried her up the path.

“Your house?” she asked.

“Mine,” he answered, kicking the door open.

He carried her across the threshold into the glistening space of his living room, where shafts of sunlight hit walls of polished pine. She saw a few pieces of furniture made by hand, a ceiling of bare rafters, an archway open upon a small kitchen with rough shelves, a bare wooden table and the astonishing sight of chromium glittering on an electric stove; the place had the primitive simplicity of a frontiersman’s cabin, reduced to essential necessities, but reduced with a super-modern skill.

He carried her across the sunrays into a small guest room and placed her down on a bed. She noticed a window open upon a long slant of rocky steps and pines going off into the sky. She noticed small streaks that looked like inscriptions cut into the wood of the walls, a few scattered lines that seemed made by different handwritings; she could not distinguish the words. She noticed another door, left half-open; it led to his bedroom.

“Am I a guest here or a prisoner?” she asked.

“The choice will be yours, Miss Taggart.”

“I can make no choice when I’m dealing with a stranger.”

“But you’re not. Didn’t you name a railroad line after me?”

“Oh!... Yes...” It was the small jolt of another connection falling into place. “Yes, I—” She was looking at the tall figure with the sun-streaked hair, with the suppressed smile in the mercilessly perceptive eyes—she was seeing the struggle to build her Line and the summer day of the first train’s run—she was thinking that if a human figure could be fashioned as an emblem of that Line, this was the figure.

“Yes... I did...” Then, remembering the rest, she added, “But I named it after an enemy.”

He smiled. “That’s the contradiction you had to resolve sooner or later, Miss Taggart.”

“It was you... wasn’t it?... who destroyed my Line...”

“Why, no. It was the contradiction.”

She closed her eyes; in a moment, she asked, “All those stories I heard about you—which of them were true?”

“All of them.”

“Was it you who spread them?”

“No. What for? I never had any wish to be talked about.”

“But you do know that you’ve become a legend?”

“Yes.”

“The young inventor of the Twentieth Century Motor Company is the one real version of the legend, isn’t it?”

“The one that’s concretely real—yes.”

She could not say it indifferently; there was still a breathless tone and the drop of her voice toward a whisper, when she asked, “The motor... the motor I found... it was you who made it?”

“Yes.”

She could not prevent the jolt of eagerness that threw her head up.

“The secret of transforming energy—” she began, and stopped, “I could tell it to you in fifteen minutes,” he said, in answer to the desperate plea she had not uttered, “but there’s no power on earth that can force me to tell it. If you understand this, you’ll understand everything that’s baffling you.”

“That night... twelve years ago... a spring night when you walked out of a meeting of six thousand murderers—that story is true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You told them that you would stop the motor of the world.”

“I have.”

“What have you done?”

“I’ve done nothing, Miss Taggart. And that’s the whole of my secret.”

She looked at him silently for a long moment. He stood waiting, as if he could read her thoughts. “The destroyer—” she said in a tone of wonder and helplessness.

“—the most evil creature that’s ever existed,” he said in the tone of a quotation, and she recognized her own words, “the man who’s draining the brains of the world.”

“How thoroughly have you been watching me,” she asked, “and for how long?”

It was only an instant’s pause, his eyes did not move, but it seemed to her that his glance was stressed, as if in special awareness of seeing her, and she caught the sound of some particular intensity in his voice as he answered quietly, “For years.”

She closed her eyes, relaxing and giving up. She felt an odd, lighthearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.

The doctor who arrived was a gray-haired man with a mild, thoughtful face and a firmly, unobtrusively confident manner.

“Miss Taggart, may I present Dr. Hendricks?” said Galt.

“Not Dr. Thomas Hendricks?” she gasped, with the involuntary rudeness of a child; the name belonged to a great surgeon, who had retired and vanished six years ago.

“Yes, of course,” said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks smiled at her, in answer. “Midas told me that Miss Taggart has to be treated for shock,” he said, “not for the one sustained, but for the ones to come.”

“I’ll leave you to do it,” said Galt, “while I go to the market to get supplies for breakfast.”

She watched the rapid efficiency of Dr. Hendricks’ work, as he examined her injuries. He had brought an object she had never seen before: a portable X-ray machine. She learned that she had torn the cartilage of two ribs, that she had sprained an ankle, ripped patches of skin off one knee and one elbow, and acquired a few bruises spread in purple blotches over her body. By the time Dr. Hendricks’ swift, competent hands had wound the bandages and the tight lacings of tape, she felt as if her body were an engine checked by an expert mechanic, and no further care was necessary, “I would advise you to remain in bed, Miss Taggart.”

“Oh no! If I’m careful and move slowly, I’ll be all right.”

“You ought to rest.”

“Do you think I can?”

He smiled. “I guess not.”

She was dressed by the time Galt came back. Dr. Hendricks gave him an account of her condition, adding, “I’ll be back to check up, tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” said Galt. “Send the bill to me.”

“Certainly not!” she said indignantly. “I will pay it myself.”

The two men glanced at each other, in amusement, as at the boast of a beggar.

“We’ll discuss that later,” said Galt.

Dr. Hendricks left, and she tried to stand up, limping, catching at the furniture for support. Galt lifted her in his arms, carried her to the kitchen alcove and placed her on a chair by the table set for two.

She noticed that she was hungry, at the sight of the coffee pot boiling on the stove, the two glasses of orange juice, the heavy white pottery dishes sparkling in the sun on the polished table top.

“When did you sleep or eat last?” he asked.

“I don’t know... I had dinner on the train, with—” She shook her head in helplessly bitter amusement: with the tramp, she thought, with a desperate voice pleading for escape from an avenger who would not pursue or be found—the avenger who sat facing her across the table, drinking a glass of orange juice. “I don’t know... it seems centuries and continents away.”

“How did you happen to be following me?”

“I landed at the Alton airport just as you were taking off. The man there told me that Quentin Daniels had gone with you.”

“I remember your plane circling to land. But that was the one and only time when I didn’t think of you. I thought you were coming by train.”

She asked, looking straight at him, “How do you want me to understand that?”

“What?”

“The one and only time when you didn’t think of me.”

He held her glance; she saw the faint movement she had noted as typical of him: the movement of his proudly intractable mouth curving into the hint of a smile. “In any way you wish,” he answered.

She let a moment pass to underscore her choice by the severity of her face, then asked coldly, in the tone of an enemy’s accusation, “You knew that I was coming for Quentin Daniels?”

“Yes.”

“You got him first and fast, in order not to let me reach him? In order to beat me—knowing fully what sort of beating that would mean for me?”

“Sure.”

It was she who looked away and remained silent. He rose to cook the rest of their breakfast. She watched him as he stood at the stove, toasting bread, frying eggs and bacon. There was an easy, relaxed skill about the way he worked, but it was a skill that belonged to another profession; his hands moved with the rapid precision of an engineer pulling the levers of a control board. She remembered suddenly where she had seen as expert and preposterous a performance.

“Is that what you learned from Dr. Akston?” she asked, pointing at the stove.

“That, among other things.”

“Did he teach you to spend your time—your time!—” she could not keep the shudder of indignation out of her voice—“on this sort of work?”

“I’ve spent time on work of much lesser importance.”

When he put her plate before her, she asked, “Where did you get that food? Do they have a grocery store here?”

“The best one in the world. It’s run by Lawrence Hammond.”

“What?”

“Lawrence Hammond, of Hammond Cars. The bacon is from the farm of Dwight Sanders—of Sanders Aircraft. The eggs and the butter from Judge Narragansett—of the Superior Court of the State of Illinois.”

She looked at her plate, bitterly, almost as if she were afraid to touch it. “It’s the most expensive breakfast I’ll ever eat, considering the value of the cook’s time and of all those others.”

“Yes—from one aspect. But from another, it’s the cheapest breakfast you’ll ever eat—because no part of it has gone to feed the looters who’ll make you pay for it through year after year and leave you to starve in the end.”

After a long silence, she asked simply, almost wistfully, “What is it that you’re all doing here?”

“Living.”

She had never heard that word sound so real, “What is your job?” she asked. “Midas Mulligan said that you work here.”

“I’m the handy man, I guess.”

“The what?”

“I’m on call whenever anything goes wrong with any of the installations—with the power system, for instance.”

She looked at him—and suddenly she tore forward, staring at the electric stove, but fell back on her chair, stopped by pain.

He chuckled. “Yes, that’s true—but take it easy or Dr. Hendricks will order you back to bed.”

“The power system...” she said, choking, “the power system here... it’s run by means of your motor?”

“Yes.”

“It’s built? It’s working? It’s functioning?”

“It has cooked your breakfast.”

“I want to see it!”

“Don’t bother crippling yourself to look at that stove. It’s just a plain electric stove like any other, only about a hundred times cheaper to run.

And that’s all you’ll have a chance to see, Miss Taggart.”

“You promised to show me this valley.”

“I’ll show it to you. But not the power generator.”

“Will you take me to see the place now, as soon as we finish?”

“If you wish—and if you’re able to move.”

“I am.”

He got up, went to the telephone and dialed a number. “Hello, Midas?... Yes... He did? Yes, she’s all right... Will you rent me your car for the day?... Thanks. At the usual rate—twenty-five cents... Can you send it over?... Do you happen to have some sort of cane? She’ll need it... Tonight? Yes, I think so.

We will. Thanks.”

He hung up. She was staring at him incredulously.

“Did I understand you to say that Mr. Mulligan—who’s worth about two hundred million dollars, I believe—is going to charge you twenty-five cents for the use of his car?”

“That’s right.”

“Good heavens, couldn’t he give it to you as a courtesy?”

He sat looking at her for a moment, studying her face, as if deliberately letting her see the amusement in his. “Miss Taggart,” he said, “we have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind. We come here because we want to rest. But we have certain customs, which we all observe, because they pertain to the things we need to rest from. So I’ll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word ‘give.’”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right.”

He refilled her cup of coffee and extended a package of cigarettes.

She smiled, as she took a cigarette: it bore the sign of the dollar.

“If you’re not too tired by evening,” he said, “Mulligan has invited us for dinner. He’ll have some guests there whom, I think, you’ll want to meet.”

“Oh, of course! I won’t be too tired. I don’t think I’ll ever feel tired again.”

They were finishing breakfast when she saw Mulligan’s car stopping in front of the house. The driver leaped out, raced up the path and rushed into the room, not pausing to ring or knock. It took her a moment to realize that the eager, breathless, disheveled young man was Quentin Daniels.

“Miss Taggart,” he gasped, “I’m sorry!” The desperate guilt in his voice clashed with the joyous excitement in his face, “I’ve never broken my word before! There’s no excuse for it, I can’t ask you to forgive me, and I know that you won’t believe it, but the truth is that I—I forgot!”

She glanced at Galt, “I believe you.”

“I forgot that I promised to wait, I forgot everything—until a few minutes ago, when Mr. Mulligan told me that you’d crashed here in a plane, and then I knew it was my fault, and if anything had happened to you—oh God, are you all right?”

“Yes. Don’t worry. Sit down.”

“I don’t know how one can forget one’s word of honor. I don’t know what happened to me.”

“I do.”

“Miss Taggart, I had been working on it for months, on that one particular hypothesis, and the more I worked, the more hopeless it seemed to become. I’d been in my laboratory for the last two days, trying to solve a mathematical equation that looked impossible. I felt I’d die at that blackboard, but wouldn’t give up. It was late at night when he came in. I don’t think I even noticed him, not really. He said he wanted to speak to me and I asked him to wait and went right on.

I think I forgot his presence. I don’t know how long he stood there, watching me, but what I remember is that suddenly his hand reached over, swept all my figures off the blackboard and wrote one brief equation. And then I noticed him! Then I screamed—because it wasn’t the full answer to the motor, but it was the way to it, a way I hadn’t seen, hadn’t suspected, but I knew where it led! I remember I cried, ‘How could you know it?’—and he answered, pointing at a photograph of your motor, ‘I’m the man who made it in the first place.’ And that’s the last I remember, Miss Taggart—I mean, the last I remember of my own existence, because after that we talked about static electricity and the conversion of energy and the motor.”

“We talked physics all the way down here,” said Galt.

“Oh, I remember when you asked me whether I’d go with you,” said Daniels, “whether I’d be willing to go and never come back and give up everything... Everything? Give up a dead Institute that’s crumbling back into the jungle, give up my future as a janitor-slave-by-law, give up Wesley Mouch and Directive 10-289 and sub-animal creatures who crawl on their bellies, grunting that there is no mind!... Miss Taggart”—he laughed exultantly—“he was asking me whether I’d give that up to go with him! He had to ask it twice, I couldn’t believe it at first, I couldn’t believe that any human being would need to be asked or would think of it as a choice. To go? I would have leaped off a skyscraper just to follow him—and to hear his formula before we hit the pavement!”

“I don’t blame you,” she said; she looked at him with a tinge of wistfulness that was almost envy. “Besides, you’ve fulfilled your contract. You’ve led me to the secret of the motor.”

“I’m going to be a janitor here, too,” said Daniels, grinning happily.

“Mr. Mulligan said he’d give me the job of janitor—at the power plant.

And when I learn, I’ll rise to electrician. Isn’t he great—Midas Mulligan? That’s what I want to be when I reach his age. I want to make money. I want to make millions. I want to make as much as he did!”

“Daniels!” She laughed, remembering the quiet self-control, the strict precision, the stern logic of the young scientist she had known. “What’s the matter with you? Where are you? Do you know what you’re saying?”

“I’m here, Miss Taggart—and there’s no limit to what’s possible here!

I’m going to be the greatest electrician in the world and the richest! I’m going to—”

“You’re going to go back to Mulligan’s house,” said Galt, “and sleep for twenty-four hours—or I won’t let you near the power plant.”

“Yes, sir,” said Daniels meekly.

The sun had trickled down the peaks and drawn a circle of shining granite and glittering snow to enclose the valley—when they stepped out of the house. She felt suddenly as if nothing existed beyond that circle, and she wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one’s concern lay within the realm of one’s sight. She wanted to stretch out her arms over the roofs of the town below, feeling that her fingertips would touch the peaks across. But she could not raise her arms; leaning on a cane with one hand and on Galt’s arm with the other, moving her feet by a slow, conscientious effort, she walked down to the car like a child learning to walk for the first time.

She sat by Galt’s side as he drove, skirting the town, to Midas Mulligan’s house. It stood on a ridge, the largest house of the valley, the only one built two stories high, an odd combination of fortress and pleasure resort, with stout granite walls and broad, open terraces. He stopped to let Daniels off, then drove on up a winding road rising slowly into the mountains.

It was the thought of Mulligan’s wealth, the luxurious car and the sight of Galt’s hands on the wheel that made her wonder for the first time whether Galt, too, was wealthy. She glanced at his clothes: the gray slacks and white shirt seemed of a quality intended for long wear; the leather of the narrow belt about his waistline was cracked; the watch on his wrist was a precision instrument, but made of plain stainless steel. The sole suggestion of luxury was the color of his hair—the strands stirring in the wind like liquid gold and copper.

Abruptly, behind a turn of the road, she saw the green acres of pastures stretching to a distant farmhouse. There were herds of sheep, some horses, the fenced squares of pigpens under the sprawling shapes of wooden barns and, farther away, a metal hangar of a type that did not belong on a farm. A man in a bright cowboy shirt was hurrying toward them. Galt stopped the car and waved to him, but said nothing in answer to her questioning glance. He let her discover for herself, when the man came closer, that it was Dwight Sanders, “Hello, Miss Taggart,” he said, smiling.

She looked silently at his rolled shirt sleeves, at his heavy boots, at the herds of cattle. “So that’s all that’s left of Sanders Aircraft,” she said.

“Why, no. There’s that excellent monoplane, my best model, which you flattened up in the foothills.”

“Oh, you know about that? Yes, it was one of yours. It was a wonderful ship. But I’m afraid I’ve damaged it pretty badly.”

“You ought to have it fixed.”

“I think I’ve ripped the bottom. Nobody can fix it.”

“I can.”

These were the words and the tone of confidence that she had not heard for years, this was the manner she had given up expecting—but the start of her smile ended in a bitter chuckle. “How?” she asked. “On a hog farm?”

“Why, no. At Sanders Aircraft.”

“Where is it?”

“Where did you think it was? In that building in New Jersey, which Tinky Holloway’s cousin bought from my bankrupt successors by means of a government loan and a tax suspension? In that building where he produced six planes that never left the ground and eight that did, but crashed with forty passengers each?”

“Where is it, then?”

“Wherever I am.”

He pointed across the road. Glancing down through the tops of the pine trees, she saw the concrete rectangle of an airfield on the bottom of the valley.

“We have a few planes here and it’s my job to take care of them,” he said. “I’m the hog farmer and the airfield attendant. I’m doing quite well at producing ham and bacon, without the men from whom I used to buy it. But those men cannot produce airplanes without me—and, without me, they cannot even produce their ham and bacon.”

“But you—you have not been designing airplanes, either.”

“No, I haven’t. And I haven’t been manufacturing the Diesel engines I once promised you. Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor. I mean, one—I tooled it by hand—no mass production was necessary. But that tractor has cut an eight-hour workday down to four hours on”—the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside—“the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett”—his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of a canyon, then to a band of violent green—“in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan”—his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves—“in the orchards of Richard Halley.”

Her eyes went slowly over the curve his arm had traveled, over and over again, long after the arm had dropped; but she said only, “I see.”

“Now do you believe that I can fix your plane?” he asked.

“Yes. But have you seen it?”

“Sure. Midas called two doctors immediately—Hendricks for you, and me for your plane. It can be fixed. But it will be an expensive job.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Two hundred dollars?” she repeated incredulously; the price seemed much too low.

“In gold, Miss Taggart.”

“Oh... ! Well, where can I buy the gold?”

“You can’t,” said Galt.

She jerked her head to face him defiantly. “No?”

“No. Not where you come from. Your laws forbid it.”

“Yours don’t?”

“No.”

“Then sell it to me. Choose your own rate of exchange. Name any sum you want—in my money.”

“What money? You’re penniless, Miss Taggart.”

“What?” It was a word that a Taggart heiress could not ever expect to hear.

“You’re penniless in this valley. You own millions of dollars in Taggart Transcontinental stock—but it will not buy one pound of bacon from the Sanders hog farm.”

“I see.”

Galt smiled and turned to Sanders. “Go ahead and fix that plane.

Miss Taggart will pay for it eventually.”

He pressed the starter and drove on, while she sat stiffly straight, asking no questions.

A stretch of violent turquoise blue split the cliffs ahead, ending the road; it took her a second to realize that it was a lake. The motionless water seemed to condense the blue of the sky and the green of the pine-covered mountains into so brilliantly pure a color that it made the sky look a dimmed pale gray. A streak of boiling foam came from among the pines and went crashing down the rocky steps to vanish in the placid water. A small granite structure stood by the stream.

Galt stopped the car just as a husky man in overalls stepped out to the threshold of the open doorway. It was Dick McNamara, who had once been her best contractor.

“Good day, Miss Taggart!” he said happily. “I’m glad to see that you weren’t hurt badly.”

She inclined her head in silent greeting—it was like a greeting to the loss and the pain of the past, to a desolate evening and the desperate face of Eddie Willers telling her the news of this man’s disappearance—hurt badly? she thought—I was, but not in the plane crash—on that evening, in an empty office... Aloud, she asked, “What are you doing here? What was it that you betrayed me for, at the worst time possible?”

He smiled, pointing at the stone structure and down at the rocky drop where the tube of a water main went vanishing into the underbrush. “I’m the utilities man,” he said. “I take care of the water lines, the power lines and the telephone service.”

“Alone?”

“Used to. But we’ve grown so much in the past year that I’ve had to hire three men to help me.”

“What men? From where?”

“Well, one of them is a professor of economics who couldn’t get a job outside, because he taught that you can’t consume more than you have produced—one is a professor of history who couldn’t get a job because he taught that the inhabitants of slums were not the men who made this country—and one is a professor of psychology who couldn’t get a job because he taught that men are capable of thinking.”

“They work for you as plumbers and linesmen?”

“You’d be surprised how good they are at it.”

“And to whom have they abandoned our colleges?”

“To those who’re wanted there.” He chuckled, “How long ago was it that I betrayed you, Miss Taggart? Not quite three years ago, wasn’t it? it’s the John Galt Line that I refused to build for you. Where is your Line now? But my lines have grown, in that time, from the couple of miles that Mulligan had built when I took over, to hundreds of miles of pipe and wire, all within the space of this valley.”

He saw the swift, involuntary look of eagerness on her face, the look of a competent person’s appreciation; he smiled, glanced at her companion and said softly, “You know, Miss Taggart, when it comes to the John Galt Line—maybe it’s I who’ve followed it and you who’re betraying it.”

She glanced at Galt. He was watching her face, but she could read nothing in his.

As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, “You’ve mapped this route deliberately, haven’t you? You’re showing me all the men whom”—she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead—“whom I have lost?”

“I’m showing you all the men whom I have taken away from you,” he answered firmly.

This was the root, she thought, of the guiltlessness of his face: he had guessed and named the words she had wanted to spare him, he had rejected a good will that was not based on his values—and in proud certainty of being right, he had made a boast of that which she had intended as an accusation.

Ahead of them, she saw a wooden pier projecting into the water of the lake. A young woman lay stretched on the sun-flooded planks, watching a battery of fishing rods. She glanced up at the sound of the car, then leaped to her feet in a single swift movement, a shade too swift, and ran to the road. She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes. Galt waved to her.

“Hello, John! When did you get in?” she called.

“This morning,” he answered, smiling and driving on.

Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.

“Who is that?” she asked.

“Our best fishwife. She provides the fish for Hammond’s grocery market.”

“What else is she?”

“You’ve noticed that there’s a ‘what else’ for every one of us here?

She’s a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn’t be published outside.

She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.”

The car turned into a narrow path, climbing steeply into a wilderness of brush and pine trees. She knew what to expect when she saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree, with an arrow pointing the way: The Buena Esperanza Pass.

It was not a pass, it was a wall of laminated rock with a complex chain of pipes, pumps and valves climbing like a vine up its narrow ledges, but it bore, on its crest, a huge wooden sign—and the proud violence of the letters announcing their message to an impassable tangle of ferns and pine branches, was more characteristic, more familiar than the words: Wyatt Oil.

It was oil that ran in a glittering curve from the mouth of a pipe into a tank at the foot of the wall, as the only confession of the tremendous secret struggle inside the stone, as the unobtrusive purpose of all the intricate machinery—but the machinery did not resemble the installations of an oil derrick, and she knew that she was looking at the unborn secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible.

Ellis Wyatt stood on a ridge, watching the glass dial of a gauge embedded in the rock. He saw the car stopping below, and called, “Hi, Dagny! Be with you in a minute!”

There were two other men working with him: a big, muscular roughneck, at a pump halfway up the wall, and a young boy, by the tank on the ground. The young boy had blond hair and a face with an unusual purity of form. She felt certain that she knew this face, but she could not recall where she had seen it. The boy caught her puzzled glance, grinned and, as if to help her, whistled softly, almost inaudibly the first notes of Halley’s Fifth Concerto. It was the young brakeman of the Comet.

She laughed. “It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn’t it?”

“Sure,” he answered. “But do you think I’d tell that to a scab?”

“A what?”

“What am I paying you for?” asked Ellis Wyatt, approaching; the boy chuckled, darting back to seize the lever he had abandoned for a moment. “It’s Miss Taggart who couldn’t fire you, if you loafed on the job. lean.”

“That’s one of the reasons why I quit the railroad, Miss Taggart,” said the boy.

“Did you know that I stole him from you?” said Wyatt. “He used to be your best brakeman and now he’s my best grease-monkey, but neither one of us is going to hold him permanently.”

“Who is?”

“Richard Halley. Music. He’s Halley’s best pupil.”

She smiled, “I know, this is a place where one employs nothing but aristocrats for the lousiest kinds of jobs.”

“They’re all aristocrats, that’s true,” said Wyatt, “because they know that there’s no such thing as a lousy job—only lousy men who don’t care to do it.”

The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, “What were you outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?”

“No, ma’am,” he answered. “I was a truck driver.” He added, “But that’s not what I wanted to remain.”

Ellis Wyatt was looking at the place around them with a kind of youthful pride eager for acknowledgment: it was the pride of a host at a formal reception in a drawing room, and the eagerness of an artist at the opening of his show in a gallery. She smiled and asked, pointing at the machinery, “Shale oil?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s the process which you were working to develop while you were on earth?” She said it involuntarily and she gasped a little at her own words.

He laughed. “While I was in hell—yes. I’m on earth now.”

“How much do you produce?”

“Two hundred barrels a day.”

A note of sadness came back into her voice: “It’s the process by which you once intended to fill five tank-trains a day.”

“Dagny,” he said earnestly, pointing at his tank, “one gallon of it is worth more than a trainful back there in hell—because this is mine, all of it, every single drop of it, to be spent on nothing but myself.” He raised his smudged hand, displaying the greasy stains as a treasure, and a black drop on the tip of his finger flashed like a gem in the sun.

“Mine,” he said. “Have you let them beat you into forgetting what that word means, what it feels like? You should give yourself a chance to relearn it.”

“You’re hidden in a hole in the wilderness,” she said bleakly, “and you’re producing two hundred barrels of oil, when you could have flooded the world with it.”

“What for? To feed the looters?”

“No! To earn the fortune you deserve.”

“But I’m richer now than I was in the world. What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster. And that’s what I’m doing: I’m manufacturing time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m producing everything I need, I’m working to improve my methods, and every hour I save is an hour added to my life. It used to take me five hours to fill that tank. It now takes three. The two I saved are mine—as pricelessly mine as if I moved my grave two further hours away for every five I’ve got. It’s two hours released from one task, to be invested in another—two more hours in which to work, to grow, to move forward. That’s the savings account I’m hoarding. Is there any sort of safety vault that could protect this account in the outside world?”

“But what space do you have for moving forward? Where’s your market?”

He chuckled. “Market? I now work for use, not for profit—my use, not the looters’ profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody’s market. I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals. If my oil takes less effort to produce, I ask less of the men to whom I trade it for the things I need. I add an extra span of time to their lives with every gallon of my oil that they burn. And since they’re men like me, they keep inventing faster ways to make the things they make—so every one of them grants me an added minute, hour or day with the bread I buy from them, with the clothes, the lumber, the metal”—he glanced at Galt—“an added year with every month of electricity I purchase. That’s our market and that’s how it works for us—but that was not the way it worked in the outer world. Down what drain were they poured out there, our days, our lives and our energy?

Into what bottomless, futureless sewer of the unpaid-for? Here, we trade achievements, not failures—values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing?

Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.

Look—” He pointed at a plant fighting upward from under the weight of a rock—a long, gnarled stem, contorted by an unnatural struggle, with drooping, yellow remnants of unformed leaves and a single green shoot thrust upward to the sun with the desperation of a last, spent, inadequate effort. “That’s what they’re doing to us back there in hell.

Do you see me submitting to it?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Do you see him submitting?” He pointed at Galt.

“God, no!”

“Then don’t be astonished by anything you see in this valley.”

She remained silent when they drove on. Galt said nothing.

On a distant mountainside, in the dense green of a forest, she saw a pine tree slanting down suddenly, tracing a curve, like the hand of a clock, then crashing abruptly out of sight. She knew that it was a manmade motion.

“Who’s the lumberjack around here?” she asked.

“Ted Nielsen.”

The road was relaxing into wider curves and gentler grades, among the softer shapes of hillsides. She saw a rust-brown slope patched by two squares of unmatching green: the dark, dusty green of potato plants, and the pale, greenish-silver of cabbages. A man in a red shirt was riding a small tractor, cutting weeds, “Who’s the cabbage tycoon?” she asked.

“Roger Marsh.”

She closed her eyes. She thought of the weeds that were climbing up the steps of a closed factory, over its lustrous tile front, a few hundred miles away, beyond the mountains.

The road was descending to the bottom of the valley. She saw the roofs of the town straight below, and the small, shining spot of the dollar sign in the distance at the other end. Galt stopped the car in front of the first structure on a ledge above the roofs, a brick building with a faint tinge of red trembling over its smokestack. It almost shocked her to see so logical a sign as “Stockton Foundry” above its door.

When she walked, leaning on her cane, out of the sunlight into the dank gloom of the building, the shock she felt was part sense of anachronism, part homesickness. This was the industrial East which, in the last few hours, had seemed to be centuries behind her. This was the old, the familiar, the loved sight of reddish billows rising to steel rafters, of sparks shooting in sunbursts from invisible sources, of sudden flames streaking through a black fog, of sand molds glowing with white metal. The fog hid the walls of the structure, dissolving its size—and for a moment, this was the great, dead foundry at Stockton, Colorado, it was Nielsen Motors... it was Rearden Steel.

“Hi, Dagny!”

The smiling face that approached her out of the fog was Andrew Stockton’s, and she saw a grimy hand extended to her with a gesture of confident pride, as if it held all of her moment’s vision on its palm.

She clasped the hand. “Hello,” she said softly, not knowing whether she was greeting the past or the future. Then she shook her head and added, “How come you’re not planting potatoes or making shoes around here? You’ve actually remained in your own profession.”

“Oh, Calvin Atwood of the Atwood Light and Power Company of New York City is making the shoes. Besides, my profession is one of the oldest and most immediately needed anywhere. Still, I had to fight for it. I had to ruin a competitor, first.”

“What?”

He grinned and pointed to the glass door of a sun-flooded room.

“There’s my ruined competitor,” he said.

She saw a young man bent over a long table, working on a complex model for the mold of a drill head. He had the slender, powerful hands of a concert pianist and the grim face of a surgeon concentrating on his task.

“He’s a sculptor,” said Stockton. “When I came here, he and his partner had a sort of combination hand-forge and repair shop. I opened a real foundry, and took all their customers away from them. The boy couldn’t do the kind of job I did, it was only a part-time business for him, anyway—sculpture is his real business—so he came to work for me. He’s making more money now, in shorter hours, than he used to make in his own foundry. His partner was a chemist, so he went into agriculture and he’s produced a chemical fertilizer that’s doubled some of the crops around here—did you mention potatoes?—potatoes, in particular.”

“Then somebody could put you out of business, too?”

“Sure. Any time. I know one man who could and probably will, when he gets here. But, boy!—I’d work for him as a cinder sweeper. He’d blast through this valley like a rocket. He’d triple everybody’s production.”

“Who’s that?”

“Hank Rearden.”

“Yes...” she whispered, “Oh yes!”

She wondered what had made her say it with such immediate certainty. She felt, simultaneously, that Hank Rearden’s presence in this valley was impossible—and that this was his place, peculiarly his, this was the place of his youth, of his start, and, together, the place he had been seeking all his life, the land he had struggled to reach, the goal of his tortured battle... It seemed to her that the spirals of flame tinged fog were drawing time into an odd circle—and while a dim thought went floating through her mind like the streamer of an unfollowed sentence: To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started—she heard the voice of a tramp in a diner, saying, “John Galt found the fountain of youth which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never came back... because he found that it couldn’t be brought down.”

A sheaf of sparks went up in the depth of the fog—and she saw the broad back of a foreman whose arm made the sweeping gesture of a signal, directing some invisible task. He jerked his head to snap an order—she caught a glimpse of his profile—and she caught her breath.

Stockton saw it, chuckled and called into the fog: “Hey, Ken! Come here! Here’s an old friend of yours!”

She looked at Ken Danagger as he approached them. The great industrialist, whom she had tried so desperately to hold to his desk, was now dressed in smudged overalls.

“Hello, Miss Taggart. I told you we’d soon meet again.”

Her head dropped, as if in assent and in greeting, but her hand bore down heavily upon her cane, for a moment, while she stood reliving their last encounter: the tortured hour of waiting, then the gently distant face at the desk and the tinkling of a glass-paneled door closing upon a stranger.

It was so brief a moment that two of the men before her could take it only as a greeting—but it was at Galt that she looked when she raised her head, and she saw him looking at her as if he knew what she felt—she saw him seeing in her face the realization that it was he who had walked out of Danagger’s office, that day. His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.

“I didn’t expect it,” she said softly, to Danagger. “I never expected to see you again.”

Danagger was watching her as if she were a promising child he had once discovered and was now affectionately amused to watch. “I know,” he said. “But why are you so shocked?”

“I... oh, it’s just that it’s preposterous!” She pointed at his clothes.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Is this, then, the end of your road?”

“Hell, no! The beginning.”

“What are you aiming at?”

“Mining. Not coal, though. Iron.”

“Where?”

He pointed toward the mountains. “Right here. Did you ever know Midas Mulligan to make a bad investment? You’d be surprised what one can find in that stretch of rock, if one knows how to look. That’s what I’ve been doing—looking.”

“And if you don’t find any iron ore?”

He shrugged. “There’s other things to do. I’ve always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for.”

She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. “Aren’t you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?”

“That’s the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man’s ability is a threat to another?”

“Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn’t think that.”

“Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That’s what I’ve always thought and—say, what are you laughing at?”

She was listening to him with an eager, incredulous smile. “It’s so startling to hear,” she said, “because it’s so right!”

“What else can one think?”

She chuckled softly. “You know, when I was a child, I expected every businessman to think it.”

“And since then?”

“Since then, I’ve learned not to expect it.”

“But it’s right, isn’t it?”

“I’ve learned not to expect the right.”

“But it stands to reason, doesn’t it?”

“I’ve given up expecting reason.”

“That’s what one must never give up,” said Ken Danagger.

They had returned to the car and had started down the last, descending curves of the road, when she glanced at Galt and he turned to her at once, as if he had expected it.

“It was you in Danagger’s office that day, wasn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you know, then, that I was waiting outside?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know what it was like, to wait behind that closed door?”

She could not name the nature of the glance with which he looked at her. It was not pity, because she did not seem to be its object; it was the kind of glance with which one looks at suffering, but it was not her suffering that he seemed to be seeing.

“Oh yes,” he answered quietly, almost lightly.

The first shop to rise by the side of the valley’s single street was like the sudden sight of an open theater: a frame box without front wall, its stage set in the bright colors of a musical comedy—with red cubes, green circles, gold triangles, which were bins of tomatoes, barrels of lettuce, pyramids of oranges, and a spangled backdrop where the sun hit shelves of metal containers. The name on the marquee said: Hammond Grocery Market. A distinguished man in shirt sleeves, with a stern profile and gray temples, was weighing a chunk of butter for an attractive young woman who stood at the counter, her posture light as a show girl’s, the skirt of her cotton dress swelling faintly in the wind, like a dance costume. Dagny smiled involuntarily, even though the man was Lawrence Hammond.

The shops were small one-story structures, and as they moved past her, she caught familiar names on their signs, like headings on the pages of a book riffled by the car’s motion: Mulligan General Store—Atwood Leather Goods—Nielsen Lumber—then the sign of the dollar above the door of a small brick factory with the inscription: Mulligan Tobacco Company. “Who’s the Company, besides Midas Mulligan?” she asked. “Dr. Akston,” he answered.

There were few passers-by, some men, fewer women, and they walked with purposeful swiftness, as if bound on specific errands. One after another, they stopped at the sight of the car, they waved to Galt and they looked at her with the unastonished curiosity of recognition.

“Have I been expected here for a long time?” she asked, “You still are,” he answered.

On the edge of the road, she saw a structure made of glass sheets held together by a wooden framework, but for one instant it seemed to her that it was only a frame for the painting of a woman—a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real. In the next instant the woman moved her head—and Dagny realized that there were people at the tables inside the structure, that it was a cafeteria, that the woman stood behind the counter, and that she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces. But at the shock of the realization, Dagny thought of the sort of movies that were now being made—and then she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow’s beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.

The building that came next was a small, squat block of rough granite, sturdy, solid, neatly built, the lines of its rectangular bulk as severely precise as the creases of a formal garment—but she saw, like an instant’s ghost, the long streak of a skyscraper rising into the coils of Chicago’s fog, the skyscraper that had once borne the sign she now saw written in gold letters above a modest pine-wood door: Mulligan Bank.

Galt slowed the car while moving past the bank, as if placing the motion in some special italics.

A small brick structure came next, bearing the sign: Mulligan Mint.

“A mint?” she asked. “What’s Mulligan doing with a mint?” Galt reached into his pocket and dropped two small coins into the palm of her hand. They were miniature disks of shining gold, smaller than pennies, the kind that had not been in circulation since the days of Nat Taggart; they bore the head of the Statue of Liberty on one side, the words “United States of America—One Dollar” on the other, but the dates stamped upon them were of the past two years.

“That’s the money we use here,” he said. “It’s minted by Midas Mulligan.”

“But... on whose authority?”

“That’s stated on the coin—on both sides of it.”

“What do you use for small change?”

“Mulligan mints that, too, in silver. We don’t accept any other currency in this valley. We accept nothing but objective values.”

She was studying the coins. “This looks like... like something from the first morning in the age of my ancestors.”

He pointed at the valley, “Yes, doesn’t it?”

She sat looking at the two thin, delicate, almost weightless drops of gold in the palm of her hand, knowing that the whole of the Taggart Transcontinental system had rested upon them, that this had been the keystone supporting all the keystones, all the arches, all the girders of the Taggart track, the Taggart Bridge, the Taggart Building... She shook her head and slipped the coins back into his hand.

“You’re not making it easier for me,” she said, her voice low.

“I’m making it as hard as possible.”

“Why don’t you say it? Why don’t you tell me all the things you want me to learn?”

The gesture of his arm pointed at the town, at the road behind them.

“What have I been doing?” he asked.

They drove on in silence. After a while, she asked, in the tone of a dryly statistical inquiry, “How much of a fortune has Midas Mulligan amassed in this valley?”

He pointed ahead. “Judge for yourself.”

The road was winding through stretches of unleveled soil toward the homes of the valley. The homes were not lined along a street, they were spread at irregular intervals over the rises and hollows of the ground, they were small and simple, built of local materials, mostly of granite and pine, with a prodigal ingenuity of thought and a tight economy of physical effort. Every house looked as if it had been put up by the labor of one man, no two houses were alike, and the only quality they had in common was the stamp of a mind grasping a problem and solving it. Galt pointed out a house, once in a while, choosing the names she knew—and it sounded to her like a list of quotations from the richest stock exchange in the world, or like a roll call of honor: “Ken Danagger... Ted Nielsen... Lawrence Hammond... Roger Marsh... Ellis Wyatt... Owen Kellogg... Dr. Akston.”

The home of Dr. Akston was the last, a small cottage with a large terrace, lifted on the crest of a wave against the rising walls of the mountains. The road went past it and climbed on into the coils of an ascending grade. The pavement shrank to a narrow path between two walls of ancient pines, their tall, straight trunks pressing against it like a grim colonnade, their branches meeting above, swallowing the path into sudden silence and twilight. There were no marks of wheels on the thin strip of earth, it looked unused and forgotten, a few minutes and a few turns seemed to take the car miles away from human habitation—and then there was nothing to break the pressure of the stillness but a rare wedge of sunlight cutting across the trunks in the depth of the forest once in a while.

The sudden sight of a house on the edge of the path struck her like the shock of an unexpected sound: built in loneliness, cut off from all ties to human existence, it looked like the secret retreat of some great defiance or sorrow. It was the humblest home of the valley, a log cabin beaten in dark streaks by the tears of many rains, only its great windows withstanding the storms with the smooth, shining, untouched serenity of glass.

“Whose house is... Oh!”—she caught her breath and jerked her head away. Above the door, hit by a ray of sun, its design blurred and worn, battered smooth by the winds of centuries, hung the silver coat-of-arms of Sebastian d’Anconia.

As if in deliberate answer to her involuntary movement of escape, Galt stopped the car in front of the house. For a moment, they held each other’s eyes: her glance was a question, his a command, her face had a defiant frankness, his an unrevealing severity; she understood his purpose, but not his motive. She obeyed. Leaning on her cane, she stepped out of the car, then stood erect, facing the house.

She looked at the silver crest that had come from a marble palace in Spain to a shack in the Andes to a log cabin in Colorado—the crest of the men who would not submit. The door of the cabin was locked, the sun did not reach into the glazed darkness beyond the windows, and pine branches hung outstretched above the roof like arms spread in protection, in compassion, in solemn blessing. With no sound but the snap of a twig or the ring of a drop falling somewhere in the forest through long stretches of moments, the silence seemed to hold all the pain that had been hidden here, but never given voice. She stood, listening with a gentle, resigned, unlamenting respect: Let’s see who’ll do greater honor, you—to Nat Taggart, or I—to Sebastian d’Anconia...

Dagny! Help me to remain. To refuse. Even though he’s right!...

She turned to look at Galt, knowing that he was the man against whom she had had no help to offer. He sat at the wheel of the car, he had not followed her or moved to assist her, as if he had wanted her to acknowledge the past and had respected the privacy of her lonely salute. She noticed that he still sat as she had left him, his forearm leaning against the wheel at the same angle, the fingers of his hand hanging down in the same sculptured position. His eyes were watching her, but that was all she could read in his face: that he had watched her intently, without moving.

When she was seated beside him once more, he said, “That was the first man I took away from you.”

She asked, her face stern, open and quietly defiant, “How much do you know about that?”

“Nothing that he told me in words. Everything that the tone of his voice told me whenever he spoke of you.”

She inclined her head. She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.

He pressed the starter, the motor’s explosion blasted the story contained in the silence, and they drove on. The path widened a little, streaming toward a pool of sunlight ahead.

She saw a brief glitter of wires among the branches, as they drove out into a clearing. An unobtrusive little structure stood against a hillside, on a rising slant of rocky ground. It was a simple cube of granite, the size of a toolshed, it had no windows, no apertures of any kind, only a door of polished steel and a complex set of wire antennae branching out from the roof. Galt was driving past, leaving it unnoticed, when she asked with a sudden start, “What’s that?”

She saw the faint break of his smile. “The powerhouse.”

“Oh, stop, please!”

He obeyed, backing the car to the foot of the hillside. It was her first few steps up the rocky incline that stopped her, as if there were no need to move forward, no further place to rise—and she stood as in the moment when she had opened her eyes on the earth of the valley, a moment uniting her beginning to her goal.

She stood looking up at the structure, her consciousness surrendered to a single sight and a single, wordless emotion—but she had always known that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind, and what she now felt was the instantaneous total of the thoughts she did not have to name, the final sum of a long progression, like a voice telling her by means of a feeling: If she had held onto Quentin Daniels, with no hope of a chance to use the motor, for the sole sake of knowing that achievement had not died on earth—if, like a weighted diver sinking in an ocean of mediocrity, under the pressure of men with gelatin eyes, rubber voices, spiral-shaped convictions, noncommittal souls and non-committing hands, she had held, as her life line and oxygen tube, the thought of a superlative achievement of the human mind—if, at the sight of the motor’s remnant, in a sudden gasp of suffocation, as a last protest from his corruption-eaten lungs, Dr. Stadler had cried for something, not to look down at, but up to, and this had been the cry, the longing and the fuel of her life—if she had moved, drawn by the hunger of her youth for a sight of clean, hard, radiant competence—then here it was before her, reached and done, the power of an incomparable mind given shape in a net of wires sparkling peacefully under a summer sky, drawing an incalculable power out of space into the secret interior of a small stone hovel.

She thought of this structure, half the size of a boxcar, replacing the power plants of the country, the enormous conglomerations of steel, fuel and effort—she thought of the current flowing from this structure, lifting ounces, pounds, tons of strain from the shoulders of those who would make it or use it, adding hours, days and years of liberated time to their lives, be it an extra moment to lift one’s head from one’s task and glance at the sunlight, or an extra pack of cigarettes bought with the money saved from one’s electric bill, or an hour cut from the workday of every factory using power, or a month’s journey through the whole, open width of the world, on a ticket paid for by one day of one’s labor, on a train pulled by the power of this motor—with all the energy of that weight, that strain, that time replaced and paid for by the energy of a single mind who had known how to make connections of wire follow the connections of his thought. But she knew that there was no meaning in motors or factories or trains, that their only meaning was in man’s enjoyment of his life, which they served—and that her swelling admiration at the sight of an achievement was for the man from whom it came, for the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one’s happiness was the purpose, the sanction and the meaning of life.

The door of the structure was a straight, smooth sheet of stainless steel, softly lustrous and bluish in the sun. Above it, cut in the granite, as the only feature of the building’s rectangular austerity, there stood an inscription: I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.

She turned to Galt. He stood beside her; he had followed her, he had known that this salute was his. She was looking at the inventor of the motor, but what she saw was the easy, casual figure of a workman in his natural setting and function—she noted the uncommon lightness of his posture, a weightless way of standing that showed an expert control of the use of his body—a tall body in simple garments: a thin shirt, light slacks, a belt about a slender waistline—and loose hair made to glitter like metal by the current of a sluggish wind. She looked at him as she had looked at his structure.

Then she knew that the first two sentences they had said to each other still hung between them, filling the silence—that everything said since, had been said over the sound of those words, that he had known it, had held it, had not let her forget it. She was suddenly aware that they were alone; it was an awareness that stressed the fact, permitting no further implication, yet holding the full meaning of the unnamed in that special stress. They were alone in a silent forest, at the foot of a structure that looked like an ancient temple—and she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind.

She felt a sudden pressure at the base of her throat, her head leaned back a little, no more than to feel the faint shift of a current against her hair, but it was as if she were lying back in space, against the wind, conscious of nothing but his legs and the shape of his mouth. He stood watching her, his face still but for the faint movement of his eyelids drawing narrow as if against too strong a light. It was like the beat of three instants—this was the first—and in the next, she felt a stab of ferocious triumph at the knowledge that his effort and his struggle were harder to endure than hers—and, then he moved his eyes and raised his head to look at the inscription on the temple.

She let him look at it for a moment, almost as an act of condescending mercy to an adversary struggling to refuel his strength, then she asked, with a note of imperious pride in her voice, pointing at the inscription, “What’s that?”

“It’s the oath that was taken by every person in this valley, but you.”

She said, looking at the words, “This has always been my own rule of living.”

“I know it.”

“But I don’t think that yours is the way to practice it.”

“Then you’ll have to learn which one of us is wrong.”

She walked up to the steel door of the structure, with a sudden confidence faintly stressed in the movements of her body, a mere hint of stress, no more than her awareness of the power she held by means of his pain—and she tried, asking no permission, to turn the knob of the door. But the door was locked, and she felt no tremor under the pressure of her hand, as if the lock were poured and sealed to the stone with the solid steel of the sheet.

“Don’t try to open that door, Miss Taggart.”

He approached her, his steps a shade too slow, as if stressing his knowledge of her awareness of every step. “No amount of physical force will do it,” he said. “Only a thought can open that door. If you tried to break it down by means of the best explosives in the world, the machinery inside would collapse into rubble long before the door would give way. But reach the thought which it requires—and the secret of the motor will be yours, as well as”—it was the first break she had heard in his voice—“as well as any other secret you might wish to know.”

He faced her for a moment, as if leaving himself open to her full understanding, then smiled oddly, quietly at some thought of his own, and added, “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

He stepped back. Then, standing still, his face raised to the words carved in the stone, he repeated them slowly, evenly, as if taking that oath once more. There was no emotion in his voice, nothing but the spaced clarity of the sounds he pronounced with full knowledge of their meaning—but she knew that she was witnessing the most solemn moment it would ever be given her to witness, she was seeing a man’s naked soul and the cost it had paid to utter these words, she was hearing an echo of the day when he had pronounced that oath for the first time and with full knowledge of the years ahead—she knew what manner of man had stood up to face six thousand others on a dark spring night and why they had been afraid of him, she knew that this was the birth and the core of all the things that had happened to the world in the twelve years since, she knew that this was of far greater import than the motor hidden inside the structure—she knew it, to the sound of a man’s voice pronouncing in self-reminder and rededication: “I swear by my life... and my love of it... that I will never live for the sake of another man... nor ask another man... to live... for mine.”

It did not startle her, it seemed unastonishing and almost unimportant, that at the end of the last sound, she saw the door opening slowly, without human touch, moving inward upon a growing strip of darkness.

In the moment when an electric light went on inside the structure, he seized the knob and pulled the door shut, its lock clicking sealed once more.

“It’s a sound lock,” he said; his face was serene. “That sentence is the combination of sounds needed to open it. I don’t mind telling you this secret—because I know that you won’t pronounce those words until you mean them the way I intended them to be meant.”

She inclined her head. “I won’t.”

She followed him down to the car, slowly, feeling suddenly too exhausted to move. She fell back against the seat, closing her eyes, barely hearing the sound of the starter. The accumulated strain and shock of her sleepless hours hit her at once, breaking through the barrier of the tension her nerves had held to delay it. She lay still, unable to think, to react or to struggle, drained of all emotions but one.

She did not speak. She did not open her eyes until the car stopped in front of his house.

“You’d better rest,” he said, “and go to sleep right now, if you want to attend Mulligan’s dinner tonight.”

She nodded obediently. She staggered to the house, avoiding his help. She made an effort to tell him, “I’ll be all right,” then to escape to the safety of her room and last long enough to close the door.

She collapsed, face down, on the bed. It was not the mere fact of physical exhaustion. It was the sudden monomania of a sensation too complete to endure. While the strength of her body was gone, while her mind had lost the faculty of consciousness, a single emotion drew on her remnants of energy, of understanding, of judgment, of control, leaving her nothing to resist it with or to direct it, making her unable to desire, only to feel, reducing her to a mere sensation—a static sensation without start or goal. She kept seeing his figure in her mind—his figure as he had stood at the door of the structure—she felt nothing else, no wish, no hope, no estimate of her feeling, no name for it, no relation to herself—there was no entity such as herself, she was not a person, only a function, the function of seeing him, and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.

Her face buried in the pillow, she recalled dimly, as a faint sensation, the moment of her take-off from the floodlighted strip of the Kansas airfield. She felt the beat of the engine, the streak of accelerating motion gathering power in a straight-line run to a single goal—and in the moment when the wheels left the ground, she was asleep.

The floor of the valley was like a pool still reflecting the glow of the sky, but the light was thickening from gold to copper, the shores were fading and the peaks were smoke-blue—when they drove to Mulligan’s house.

There was no trace of exhaustion left in her bearing and no remnant of violence. She had awakened at sundown; stepping out of her room, she had found Galt waiting, sitting idly motionless in the light of a lamp. He had glanced up at her; she had stood in the doorway, her face composed, her hair smooth, her posture relaxed and confident—she had looked as she would have looked on the threshold of her office in the Taggart Building, but for the slight angle of her body leaning on a cane. He had sat looking at her for a moment, and she had wondered why she had felt certain that this was the image he was seeing—he was seeing the doorway of her office, as if it were a sight long-imagined and long-forbidden.

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence. She watched a few lights come up in the distant homes of the valley, then the lighted windows of Mulligan’s house on the ledge ahead. She asked, “Who will be there?”

“Some of your last friends,” he answered, “and some of my first.”

Midas Mulligan met them at the door. She noticed that his grim, square face was not as harshly expressionless as she had thought: he had a look of satisfaction, but satisfaction could not soften his features, it merely struck them like flint and sent sparks of humor to glitter faintly in the corners of his eyes, a humor that was shrewder, more demanding, yet warmer than a smile.

He opened the door of his house, moving his arm a shade more slowly than normal, giving an imperceptibly solemn emphasis to his gesture.

Walking into the living room, she faced seven men who rose to their feet at her entrance.

“Gentlemen—Taggart Transcontinental,” said Midas Mulligan.

He said it smiling, but only half-jesting; some quality in his voice made the name of the railroad sound as it would have sounded in the days of Nat Taggart, as a sonorous title of honor.

She inclined her head, slowly, in acknowledgment to the men before her, knowing that these were the men whose standards of value and honor were the same as her own, the men who recognized the glory of that title as she recognized it, knowing with a sudden stab of wistfulness how much she had longed for that recognition through all her years.

Her eyes moved slowly, in greeting, from face to face: Ellis Wyatt—Ken Danagger—Hugh Akston—Dr. Hendricks—Quentin Daniels—Mulligan’s voice pronounced the names of the two others: “Richard Halley—Judge Narragansett.”

The faint smile on Richard Halley’s face seemed to tell her that they had known each other for years—as, in her lonely evenings by the side of her phonograph, they had. The austerity of Judge Narragansett’s white-haired figure reminded her that she had once heard him described as a marble statue—a blindfolded marble statue; it was the kind of figure that had vanished from the courtrooms of the country when the gold coins had vanished from the country’s hands.

“You have belonged here for a long time, Miss Taggart,” said Midas Mulligan. “This was not the way we expected you to come, but—welcome home.”

No!—she wanted to answer, but heard herself answering softly, “Thank you.”

“Dagny, how many years is it going to take you to learn to be yourself?” It was Ellis Wyatt, grasping her elbow, leading her to a chair, grinning at her look of helplessness, at the struggle between a smile and a tightening resistance in her face. “Don’t pretend that you don’t understand us. You do.”

“We never make assertions, Miss Taggart,” said Hugh Akston. “That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell—we show.

We do not claim—we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw—we can help you to name it, but not to accept it—the sight, the knowledge and the acceptance must be yours.”

“I feel as if I know it,” she answered simply, “and more: I feel as if I’ve always known it, but never found it, and now I’m afraid, not afraid to hear it, just afraid that it’s coming so close.”

Akston smiled. “What does this look like to you, Miss Taggart?” He pointed around the room.

“This?” She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. “This looks like... You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word—and now—now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet.”

“Well, that’s one clue to the nature of our secret,” said Akston.

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“And if you met those great men in heaven,” asked Ken Danagger, “what would you want to say to them?”

“Just... just ‘hello,’ I guess.”

“That’s not all,” said Danagger. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them. I didn’t know it, either, until I saw him for the first time”—he pointed to Galt—“and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss Taggart, you’d want them to look at you and to say, ‘Well done.’” She dropped her head and nodded silently, head down, not to let him see the sudden spurt of tears to her eyes. “All right, then: Well done, Dagny!—well done—too well—and now it’s time for you to rest from that burden which none of us should ever have had to carry.”

“Shut up,” said Midas Mulligan, looking at her bowed head with anxious concern.

But she raised her head, smiling. “Thank you,” she said to Danagger.

“If you talk about resting, then let her rest,” said Mulligan. “She’s had too much for one day.”

“No.” She smiled. “Go ahead, say it—whatever it is.”

“Later,” said Mulligan.

It was Mulligan and Akston who served dinner, with Quentin Daniels to help them. They served it on small silver trays, to be placed on the arms of the chairs—and they all sat about the room, with the fire of the sky fading in the windows and sparks of electric light glittering in the wine glasses. There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity; she noted the costly furniture, carefully chosen for comfort, bought somewhere at a time when luxury had still been an art. There were no superfluous objects, but she noticed a small canvas by a great master of the Renaissance, worth a fortune, she noticed an Oriental rug of a texture and color that belonged under glass in a museum. This was Mulligan’s concept of wealth, she thought—the wealth of selection, not of accumulation.

Quentin Daniels sat on the floor, with his tray on his lap; he seemed completely at home, and he glanced up at her once in a while, grinning like an impudent kid brother who had beaten her to a secret she had not discovered. He had preceded her into the valley by some ten minutes, she thought, but he was one of them, while she was still a stranger.

Galt sat aside, beyond the circle of lamplight, on the arm of Dr. Akston’s chair. He had not said a word, he had stepped back and turned her over to the others, and he sat watching it as a spectacle in which he had no further part to play. But her eyes kept coming back to him, drawn by the certainty that the spectacle was of his choice and staging, that he had set it in motion long ago, and that all the others knew it as she knew it.

She noticed another person who was intensely aware of Galt’s presence: Hugh Akston glanced up at him once in a while, involuntarily, almost surreptitiously, as if struggling not to confess the loneliness of a long separation. Akston did not speak to him, as if taking his presence for granted. But once, when Galt bent forward and a strand of hair fell down across his face, Akston reached over and brushed it back, his hand lingering for an imperceptible instant on his pupil’s forehead: it was the only break of emotion he permitted himself, the only greeting; it was the gesture of a father.

She found herself talking to the men around her, relaxing in lighthearted comfort. No, she thought, what she felt was not strain, it was a dim astonishment at the strain which she should, but did not, feel; the abnormality of it was that it seemed so normal and simple.

She was barely aware of her questions, as she spoke to one man after another, but their answers were printing a record in her mind, moving sentence by sentence to a goal.

“The Fifth Concerto?” said Richard Halley, in answer to her question. “I wrote it ten years ago. We call it the Concerto of Deliverance.

Thank you for recognizing it from a few notes whistled in the night.

... Yes, I know about that... Yes, since you knew my work, you would know, when you heard it, that this Concerto said everything I had been struggling to say and reach. It’s dedicated to him.” He pointed to Galt. “Why, no, Miss Taggart, I haven’t given up music, What makes you think so? I’ve written more in the last ten years than in any other period of my life. I will play it for you, any of it, when you come to my house... No, Miss Taggart, it will not be published outside. Not a note of it will be heard beyond these mountains.”

“No, Miss Taggart, I have not given up medicine,” said Dr. Hendricks, in answer to her question. “I have spent the last six years on research. I have discovered a method to protect the blood vessels of the brain from that fatal rupture which is known as a brain stroke. It will remove from human existence the terrible threat of sudden paralysis.

... No, not a word of my method will be heard outside.”

“The law, Miss Taggart?” said Judge Narragansett. “What law? I did not give it up—it has ceased to exist. But I am still working in the profession I had chosen, which was that of serving the cause of justice.

... No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists... Yes, I am continuing in my profession. I am writing a treatise on the philosophy of law, I shall demonstrate that humanity’s darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law... No, Miss Taggart, my treatise will not be published outside.”

“My business, Miss Taggart?” said Midas Mulligan. “My business is blood transfusion—and I’m still doing it. My job is to feed a life-fuel into the plants that are capable of growing. But ask Dr. Hendricks whether any amount of blood will save a body that refuses to function, a rotten hulk that expects to exist without effort. My blood bank is gold. Gold is a fuel that will perform wonders, but no fuel can work where there is no motor... No, I haven’t given up. I merely got fed up with the job of running a slaughter house, where one drains blood out of healthy living beings and pumps it into gutless half-corpses.”

“Given up?” said Hugh Akston. “Check your premises, Miss Taggart.

None of us has given up. It is the world that has... What is wrong with a philosopher running a roadside diner? Or a cigarette factory, as I am doing now? All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work—and that which is its source—as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost... The source of work? Man’s mind, Miss Taggart, man’s reasoning mind. I am writing a book on this subject, defining a moral philosophy that I learned from my own pupil... Yes, it could save the world... No, it will not be published outside.”

“Why?” she cried. “Why? What are you doing, all of you?”

“We are on strike,” said John Galt.

They all turned to him, as if they had been waiting for his voice and for that word. She heard the empty beat of time within her, which was the sudden silence of the room, as she looked at him across a span of lamplight. He sat slouched casually on the arm of a chair, leaning forward, his forearm across his knees, his hand hanging down idly—and it was the faint smile on his face that gave to his words the deadly sound of the irrevocable: “Why should this seem so startling? There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable—except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race.

Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike.”

She did not move, except for the fingers of one hand that moved slowly up her cheek to her temple.

“Through all the ages,” he said, “the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter—every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation—every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad—have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which—in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders—some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive. Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice—it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two make four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction—only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human, and only the sum of such moments permitted them to continue to exist. It was the man of the mind who taught them to bake their bread, to heal their wounds, to forge their weapons and to build the jails into which they threw him. He was the man of extravagant energy—and reckless generosity—who knew that stagnation is not man’s fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power—and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs. This was his glory and his guilt—that he let them teach him to feel guilty of his glory, to accept the part of a sacrificial animal and, in punishment for the sin of intelligence, to perish on the altars of the brutes. The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal’s attributes, not man’s, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force—the mystics and the kings—the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted—and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man’s soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man’s body were concerned with his stomach—but both were united against his mind. Yet no one, not the lowest of humans, is ever able fully to renounce his brain. No one has ever believed in the irrational; what they do believe in is the unjust.

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction. It is the victims who made injustice possible. It is the men of reason who made it possible for the rule of the brute to work. The despoiling of reason has been the motive of every anti-reason creed on earth. The despoiling of ability has been the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice. The despoilers have always known it. We haven’t. The time has come for us to see. What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it. This is the age of the common man, they tell us—a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve. He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he will be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce. But we—we, who must atone for the guilt of ability—we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we will have the least to say. Since we have the better capacity to think, we will not be permitted a thought of our own. Since we have the judgment to act, we will not be permitted an action of our choice. We will work under directives and controls, issued by those who are incapable of working. They will dispose of our energy, because they have none to offer, and of our product, because they can’t produce. Do you say that this is impossible, that it cannot be made to work? They know it, but it is you who don’t—and they are counting on you not to know it. They are counting on you to go on, to work to the limit of the inhuman and to feed them while you last—and when you collapse, there will be another victim starting out and feeding them, while struggling to survive—and the span of each succeeding victim will be shorter, and while you’ll die to leave them a railroad, your last descendant-in-spirit will die to leave them a loaf of bread.

This does not worry the looters of the moment. Their plan—like all the plans of all the royal looters of the past—is only that the loot shall last their lifetime. It has always lasted before, because in one generation they could not run out of victims. But this time—it will not last. The victims are on strike. We are on strike against martyrdom—and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please. But, for once, they will have to believe it and to exist—without our help. And, once and for all, they will learn the meaning of their creed. That creed has lasted for centuries solely by the sanction of the victims—by means of the victims’ acceptance of punishment for breaking a code impossible to practice. But that code was intended to be broken. It is a code that thrives not on those who observe it, but on those who don’t, a morality kept in existence not by virtue of its saints, but by the grace of its sinners. We have decided not to be sinners any longer. We have ceased breaking that moral code. We shall blast it out of existence forever by the one method that it can’t withstand: by obeying it. We are obeying it. We are complying. In dealing with our fellow men, we are observing their code of values to the letter and sparing them all the evils they denounce. The mind is evil? We have withdrawn the works of our minds from society, and not a single idea of ours is to be known or used by men. Ability is a selfish evil that leaves no chance to those who are less able? We have withdrawn from the competition and left all chances open to incompetents. The pursuit of wealth is greed, the root of all evil? We do not seek to make fortunes any longer. It is evil to earn more than one’s bare sustenance? We take nothing but the lowliest jobs and we produce, by the effort of our muscles, no more than we consume for our immediate needs—with not a penny nor an inventive thought left over to harm the world. It is evil to succeed, since success is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? We have ceased burdening the weak with our ambition and have left them free to prosper without us. It is evil to be an employer? We have no employment to offer. It is evil to own property? We own nothing. It is evil to enjoy one’s existence in this world? There is no form of enjoyment that we seek from their world, and—this was hardest for us to attain—what we now feel for their world is that emotion which they preach as an ideal: indifference—the blank—the zero—the mark of death...

We are giving men everything they’ve professed to want and to seek as virtue for centuries. Now let them see whether they want it.”

“It was you who started this strike?” she asked.

“I did.”

He got up, he stood, hands in pockets, his face in the light—and she saw him smile with the easy, effortless, implacable amusement of certainty.

“We’ve heard so much about strikes,” he said, “and about the dependence of the uncommon man upon the common. We’ve heard it shouted that the industrialist is a parasite, that his workers support him, create his wealth, make his luxury possible—and what would happen to him if they walked out? Very well. I propose to show to the world who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to whom when who walks out.”

The windows were now sheets of darkness, reflecting the dots of lighted cigarettes. He picked a cigarette from a table beside him, and in the flare of a match she saw the brief sparkle of gold, the dollar sign, between his fingers.

“I quit and joined him and went on strike,” said Hugh Akston, “because I could not share my profession with men who claim that the qualification of an intellectual consists of denying the existence of the intellect. People would not employ a plumber who’d attempt to prove his professional excellence by asserting that there’s no such thing as plumbing—but, apparently, the same standards of caution are not considered necessary in regard to philosophers. I learned from my own pupil, however, that it was I who made this possible. When thinkers accept those who deny the existence of thinking, as fellow thinkers of a different school of thought—it is they who achieve the destruction of the mind. They grant the enemy’s basic premise, thus granting the sanction of reason to formal dementia. A basic premise is an absolute that permits no co-operation with its antithesis and tolerates no tolerance. In the same manner and for the same reason as a banker may not accept and pass counterfeit money, granting it the sanction, honor and prestige of his bank, just as he may not grant the counterfeiter’s demand for tolerance of a mere difference of opinion—so I may not grant the title of philosopher to Dr. Simon Pritchett or compete with him for the minds of men. Dr. Pritchett has nothing to deposit to the account of philosophy, except his declared intention to destroy it. He seeks to cash in—by means of denying it—on the power of reason among men. He seeks to stamp the mint-mark of reason upon the plans of his looting masters. He seeks to use the prestige of philosophy to purchase the enslavement of thought. But that prestige is an account which can exist only so long as I am there to sign the checks.

Let him do it without me. Let him—and those who entrust to him their children’s minds—have exactly that which they demand: a world of intellectuals without intellect and of thinkers who proclaim that they cannot think. I am conceding it. I am complying. And when they see the absolute reality of their non-absolute world, I will not be there and it will not be I who will pay the price of their contradictions.”

“Dr. Akston quit on the principle of sound banking,” said Midas Mulligan. “I quit on the principle of love. Love is the ultimate form of recognition one grants to superlative values. It was the Hunsacker case that made me quit—that case when a court of law ordered that I honor, as first right to my depositors’ funds, the demand of those who would offer proof that they had no right to demand it. I was ordered to hand out money earned by men, to a worthless rotter whose only claim consisted of his inability to earn it. I was born on a farm. I knew the meaning of money. I had dealt with many men in my life. I had watched them grow. I had made my fortune by being able to spot a certain kind of man. The kind who never asked you for faith, hope and charity, but offered you facts, proof and profit. Did you know that I invested in Hank Rearden’s business at the time when he was rising, when he had just beaten his way out of Minnesota to buy the steel mills in Pennsylvania? Well, when I looked at that court order on my desk, I had a vision. I saw a picture, and I saw it so clearly that it changed the looks of everything for me. I saw the bright face and the eyes of young Rearden, as he’d been when I’d met him first. I saw him lying at the foot of an altar, with his blood running down into the earth—and what stood on that altar was Lee Hunsacker, with the mucus-filled eyes, whining that he’d never had a chance... It’s strange how simple things become, once you see them clearly. It wasn’t hard for me to close the bank and go: I kept seeing, for the first time in my life, what it was that I had lived for and loved.”

She looked at Judge Narragansett. “You quit over the same case, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Judge Narragansett. “I quit when the court of appeals reversed my ruling. The purpose for which I had chosen my work, was my resolve to be a guardian of justice. But the laws they asked me to enforce made me the executor of the vilest injustice conceivable. I was asked to use force to violate the rights of disarmed men, who came before me to seek my protection for their rights. Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept. Now I saw that one man was to be bound by it, but the other was not, one was to obey a rule, the other was to assert an arbitrary wish—his need—and the law was to stand on the side of the wish. Justice was to consist of upholding the unjustifiable. I quit—because I could not have borne to hear the words ‘Your Honor’ addressed to me by an honest man.”

Her eyes moved slowly to Richard Halley, as if she were both pleading and afraid to hear his story. He smiled.

“I would have forgiven men for my struggle,” said Richard Halley.

“It was their view of my success that I could not forgive. I had felt no hatred in all the years when they rejected me. If my work was new, I had to give them time to learn, if I took pride in being first to break a trail to a height of my own, I had no right to complain if others were slow to follow. That was what I had told myself through all those years—except on some nights, when I could neither wait nor believe any longer, when I cried ‘why?’ but found no answer. Then, on the night when they chose to cheer me, I stood before them on the stage of a theater, thinking that this was the moment I had struggled to reach, wishing to feel it, but feeling nothing. I was seeing all the other nights behind me, hearing the ‘why?’ which still had no answer—and their cheers seemed as empty as their snubs. If they had said, ‘Sorry to be so late, thank you for waiting—I would have asked for nothing else and they could have had anything I had to give them. But what I saw in their faces, and in the way they spoke when they crowded to praise me, was the thing I had heard being preached to artists—only I had never believed that anyone human could mean it. They seemed to say that they owed me nothing, that their deafness had provided me with a moral goal, that it had been my duty to struggle, to suffer, to bear—for their sake—whatever sneers, contempt, injustice, torture they chose to inflict upon me, to bear it in order to teach them to enjoy my work, that this was their rightful due and my proper purpose. And then I understood the nature of the looter-in-spirit, a thing I had never been able to conceive. I saw them reaching into my soul, just as they reach into Mulligan’s pocket, reaching to expropriate the value of my person, just as they reach to expropriate his wealth—I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters—I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan’s money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music, so that precisely by reason of my achievement, it would not be they who’d acknowledge my value, but I who would bow to theirs... It was that night that I took the oath never to let them hear another note of mine. The streets were empty when I left that theater, I was the last one to leave—and I saw a man whom I had never seen before, waiting for me in the light of a lamppost. He did not have to tell me much. But the concerto I dedicated to him is called the Concerto of Deliverance.”

She looked at the others. “Please tell me your reasons,” she said, with a faint stress of firmness in her voice, as if she were taking a beating, but wished to take it to the end.

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

“I quit,” said Ellis Wyatt, “because I didn’t wish to serve as the cannibals’ meal and to do the cooking, besides.”

“I discovered,” said Ken Danagger, “that the men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands. I quit, to let them discover it, too.”

“I quit,” said Quentin Daniels, “because, if there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth.”

They were silent. She turned to Galt. “And you?” she asked. “You were first. What made you come to it?”

He chuckled, “My refusal to be born with any original sin.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who’d claim that I exist for the sake of his need—and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling. That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.”

“And the motor?” she asked. “Why did you abandon it? Why did you leave it to the Starnes heirs?”

“It was then father’s property. He paid me for it. It was made on his time. But I knew that it would be of no benefit to them and that no one would ever hear of it again. It was my first experimental model.

Nobody but me or my equivalent could have been able to complete it or even to grasp what it was. And I knew that no equivalent of mine would come near that factory from then on.”

“You knew the kind of achievement your motor represented?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew you were leaving it to perish?”

“Yes.” He looked off into the darkness beyond the windows and chuckled softly, but it was not a sound of amusement. “I looked at my motor for the last tune, before I left. I thought of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of natural resources—and of the men who claim that wealth is a matter of seizing the factories—and of the men who claim that machines condition their brains. Well, there was the motor to condition them, and there it remained as just exactly what it is without man’s mind—as a pile of metal scraps and wires, going to rust. You have been thinking of the great service which that motor could have rendered to mankind, if it had been put into production. I think that on the day when men understand the meaning of its fate in that factory’s junk heap—it will have rendered a greater one.”

“Did you expect to see that day, when you left it?”

“No.”

“Did you expect a chance to rebuild it elsewhere?”

“No.”

“And you were willing to let it remain in a junk heap?”

“For the sake of what that motor meant to me,” he said slowly, “I had to be willing to let it crumble and vanish forever”—he looked straight at her and she heard the steady, unhesitant, uninflected ruthlessness of his voice—“just as you will have to be willing to let the rail of Taggart Transcontinental crumble and vanish.”

She held his eyes, her head was lifted, and she said softly, in the tone of a proudly open plea, “Don’t make me answer you now.”

“I won’t. We’ll tell you whatever you wish to know. We won’t urge you to make a decision.” He added, and she was shocked by the sudden gentleness of his voice, “I said that that kind of indifference toward a world which should have been ours was the hardest thing to attain. I know. We’ve all gone through it.”

She looked at the quiet, impregnable room, and at the light—the light that came from his motor—on the faces of men who were the most serene and confident gathering she had ever attended.

“What did you do, when you walked out of the Twentieth Century?” she asked.

“I went out to become a flame-spotter. I made it my job to watch for those bright flares in the growing night of savagery, which were the men of ability, the men of the mind—to watch their course, their struggle and their agony—and to pull them out, when I knew that they had seen enough.”

“What did you tell them to make them abandon everything?”

“I told them that they were right.”

In answer to the silent question of her glance, he added, “I gave them the pride they did not know they had. I gave them the words to identify it. I gave them that priceless possession which they had missed, had longed for, yet had not known they needed: a moral sanction. Did you call me the destroyer and the hunter of men? I was the walking delegate of this strike, the leader of the victims’ rebellion, the defender of the oppressed, the disinherited, the exploited—and when I use these words, they have, for once, a literal meaning.”

“Who were the first to follow you?”

He let a moment pass, in deliberate emphasis, then answered, “My two best friends. You know one of them. You know, perhaps better than anyone else, what price he paid for it. Our own teacher, Dr. Akston, was next. He joined us within one evening’s conversation. William Hastings, who had been my boss in the research laboratory of Twentieth Century Motors, had a hard time, fighting it out with himself. It took him a year. But he joined. Then Richard Halley. Then Midas Mulligan.”

“—who took fifteen minutes,” said Mulligan.

She turned to him. “It was you who established this valley?”

“Yes,” said Mulligan. “It was just my own private retreat, at first. I bought it years ago, I bought miles of these mountains, section by section, from ranchers and cattlemen who didn’t know what they owned. The valley is not listed on any map. I built this house, when I decided to quit. I cut off all possible avenues of approach, except one road—and it’s camouflaged beyond anyone’s power to discover—and I stocked this place to be self-supporting, so that I could live here for the rest of my life and never have to see the face of a looter. When I heard that John had got Judge Narragansett, too, I invited the Judge to come here. Then we asked Richard Halley to join us. The others remained outside, at first.”

“We had no rules of any kind,” said Galt, “except one. When a man took our oath, it meant a single commitment: not to work in his own profession, not to give to the world the benefit of his mind. Each of us carried it out in any manner he chose. Those who had money, retired to live on their savings. Those who had to work, took the lowest jobs they could find. Some of us had been famous; others—like that young brakeman of yours, whom Halley discovered—were stopped by us before they had set out to get tortured. But we did not give up our minds or the work we loved. Each of us continued in his real profession, in whatever manner and spare time he could manage—but he did it secretly, for his own sole benefit, giving nothing to men, sharing nothing. We were scattered all over the country, as the outcasts we had always been, only now we accepted our parts with conscious intention.

Our sole relief were the rare occasions when we could see one another.

We found that we liked to meet—in order to be reminded that human beings still existed. So we came to set aside one month a year to spend in this valley—to rest, to live in a rational world, to bring our real work out of hiding, to trade our achievements—here, where achievements meant payment, not expropriation. Each of us built his own house here, at his own expense—for one month of life out of twelve.

It made the eleven easier to bear.”

“You see, Miss Taggart,” said Hugh Akston, “man is a social being, but not in the way the looters preach.”

“It’s the destruction of Colorado that started the growth of this valley,” said Midas Mulligan. “Ellis Wyatt and the others came to live here permanently, because they had to hide. Whatever part of their wealth they could salvage, they converted into gold or machines, as I had, and they brought it here. There were enough of us to develop the place and to create jobs for those who had had to earn their living outside. We have now reached the stage where most of us can live here full time. The valley is almost self-supporting—and as to the goods that we can’t yet produce, I purchase them from the outside through a pipe line of my own. It’s a special agent, a man who does not let my money reach the looters. We are not a state here, not a society of any kind—we’re just a voluntary association of men held together by nothing but every man’s self-interest. I own the valley and I sell the land to the others, when they want it. Judge Narragansett is to act as our arbiter, in case of disagreements. He hasn’t had to be called upon, as yet. They say that it’s hard for men to agree. You’d be surprised how easy it is—when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade. The time is approaching when all of us will have to be called to live here—because the world is falling apart so fast that it will soon be starving.

But we will be able to support ourselves in this valley.”

“The world is crashing faster than we expected,” said Hugh Akston.

“Men are stopping and giving up. Your frozen trains, the gangs of raiders, the deserters, they’re men who’ve never heard of us, and they’re not part of our strike, they are acting on their own—it’s the natural response of whatever rationality is still left in them—it’s the same kind of protest as ours.”

“We started with no time limit in view,” said Galt. “We did not know whether we’d live to see the liberation of the world or whether we’d have to leave our battle and our secret to the next generations.

We knew only that this was the only way we cared to live. But now we think that we will see, and soon, the day of our victory and of our return.”

“When?” she whispered.

“When the code of the looters has collapsed.”

He saw her looking at him, her glance half-question, half-hope, and he added, “When the creed of self-immolation has run, for once, its undisguised course—when men find no victims ready to obstruct the path of justice and to deflect the fall of retribution on themselves—when the preachers of self-sacrifice discover that those who are willing to practice it, have nothing to sacrifice, and those who have, are not willing any longer—when men see that neither their hearts nor their muscles can save them, but the mind they damned is not there to answer their screams for help—when they collapse as they must, as men without mind—when they have no pretense of authority left, no remnant of law, no trace of morality, no hope, no food and no way to obtain it—when they collapse and the road is clear—then we’ll come back to rebuild the world.”

The Taggart Terminal, she thought; she heard the words beating through the numbness of her mind, as the sum of a burden she had not had time to weigh. This was the Taggart Terminal, she thought, this room, not the giant concourse in New York—this was her goal, the end of track, the point beyond the curve of the earth where the two straight lines of rail met and vanished, drawing her forward—as they had drawn Nathaniel Taggart—this was the goal Nathaniel Taggart had seen in the distance and this was the point still holding the straight-line glance of his lifted head above the spiral motion of men in the granite concourse. It was for the sake of this that she had dedicated herself to the rail of Taggart Transcontinental, as to the body of a spirit yet to be found. She had found it, everything she had ever wanted, it was here in this room, reached and hers—but the price was that net of rail behind her, the rail that would vanish, the bridges that would crumble, the signal lights that would go out... And yet... Everything I had ever wanted, she thought—looking away from the figure of a man with sun-colored hair and implacable eyes.

“You don’t have to answer us now.”

She raised her head; he was watching her as if he had followed the steps in her mind.

“We never demand agreement,” he said. “We never tell anyone more than he is ready to hear. You are the first person who has learned our secret ahead of time. But you’re here and you had to know. Now you know the exact nature of the choice you’ll have to make. If it seems hard, it’s because you still think that it does not have to be one or the other. You will learn that it does.”

“Will you give me time?”

“Your time is not ours to give. Take your time. You alone can decide what you’ll choose to do, and when. We know the cost of that decision. We’ve paid it. That you’ve come here might now make it easier for you—or harder.”

“Harder,” she whispered.

“I know.”

He said it, his voice as low as hers, with the same sound of being forced past one’s breath, and she missed an instant of time, as in the stillness after a blow, because she felt that this—not the moments when he had carried her in his arms down the mountainside, but this meeting of their voices—had been the closest physical contact between them.

A full moon stood in the sky above the valley, when they drove back to his house; it stood like a flat, round lantern without rays, with a haze of light hanging in space, not reaching the ground, and the illumination seemed to come from the abnormal white brightness of the soil. In the unnatural stillness of sight without color, the earth seemed veiled by a film of distance, its shapes did not merge into a landscape, but went slowly flowing past, like the print of a photograph on a cloud.

She noticed suddenly that she was smiling. She was looking down at the houses of the valley. Their lighted windows were dimmed by a bluish cast, the outlines of their walls were dissolving, long bands of mist were coiling among them in torpid, unhurried waves. It looked like a city sinking under water.

“What do they call this place?” she asked.

“I call it Mulligan’s Valley,” he said. “The others call it Galt’s Gulch.”

“I’d call it—” but she did not finish.

He glanced at her. She knew what he saw in her face. He turned away.

She saw a faint movement of his lips, like the release of a breath that he was forcing to function. She dropped her glance, her arm falling against the side of the car, as if her hand were suddenly too heavy for the weakness in the crook of her elbow.

The road grew darker, as it went higher, and pine branches met over their heads. Above a slant of rock moving to meet them, she saw the moonlight on the windows of his house. Her head fell back against the seat and she lay still, losing awareness of the car, feeling only the motion that carried her forward, watching the glittering drops of water in the pine branches, which were the stars.

When the car stopped, she did not permit herself to know why she did not look at him as she stepped, out. She did not know that she stood still for an instant, looking up at the dark windows. She did not hear him approach; but she felt the impact of his hands with shocking intensity, as if it were the only awareness she could now experience.

He lifted her in his arms and started slowly up the path to the house.

He walked, not looking at her, holding her tight, as if trying to hold a progression of time, as if his arms were still locked over the moment when he had lifted her against his chest. She felt his steps as if they were a single span of motion to a goal and as if each step were a separate moment in which she dared not think of the next.

Her head was close to his, his hair brushing her cheek, and she knew that neither of them would move his face that one breath closer. It was a sudden, stunned state of quiet drunkenness, complete in itself, their hair mingled like the rays of two bodies in space that had achieved their meeting, she saw that he walked with his eyes closed, as if even sight would now be an intrusion.

He entered the house, and as he moved across the living room, he did not look to his left and neither did she, but she knew that both of them were seeing the door on his left that led to his bedroom. He walked the length of the darkness to the wedge of moonlight that fell across the guest-room bed, he placed her down upon it, she felt an instant’s pause of his hands still holding her shoulder and waistline, and when his hands left her body, she knew that the moment was over.

He stepped back and pressed a switch, surrendering the room to the harshly public glare of light. He stood still, as if demanding that she look at him, his face expectant and stern.

“Have you forgotten that you wanted to shoot me on sight?” he asked.

It was the unprotected stillness of his figure that made it real. The shudder that threw her upright was like a cry of terror and denial; but she held his glance and answered evenly, “That’s true. I did.”

“Then stand by it.”

Her voice was low, its intensity was both a surrender and a scornful reproach: “You know better than that, don’t you?”

He shook his head. “No. I want you to remember that that had been your wish. You were right, in the past. So long as you were part of the outer world, you had to seek to destroy me. And of the two courses now open to you, one will lead you to the day when you will find yourself forced to do it.” She did not answer, she sat looking down, he saw the strands of her hair swing jerkily as she shook her head in desperate protest. “You are my only danger. You are the only person who could deliver me to my enemies. If you remain with them, you will. Choose that, if you wish, but choose it with full knowledge.

Don’t answer me now. But until you do”—the stress of severity in his voice was the sound of effort directed against himself—“remember that I know the meaning of either answer.”

“As fully as I do?” she whispered.

“As fully.”

He turned to go, when her eyes fell suddenly upon the inscriptions she had noticed, and forgotten, on the walls of the room.

They were cut into the polish of the wood, still showing the force of the pencil’s pressure in the hands that had made them, each in his own violent writing: “You’ll get over it—Ellis Wyatt” “It will be all right by morning—Ken Danagger” “It’s worth it—Roger Marsh.”

There were others, “What is that?” she asked.

He smiled. “This is the room where they spent their first night in the valley. The first night is the hardest. It’s the last pull of the break with one’s memories, and the worst. I let them stay here, so they can call for me, if they want me. I speak to them, if they can’t sleep.

Most of them can’t. But they’re free of it by morning... They’ve all gone through this room. Now they call it the torture chamber or the anteroom—because everyone has to enter the valley through my house.”

He turned to go, he stopped on the threshold and added: “This is the room I never intended you to occupy. Good night, Miss Taggart.”

CHAPTER II THE UTOPIA OF GREED

“Good morning.”

She looked at him across the living room from the threshold of her door. In the windows behind him, the mountains had that tinge of silver-pink which seems brighter than daylight, with the promise of a light to come. The sun had risen somewhere over the earth, but it had not reached the top of the barrier, and the sky was glowing in its stead, announcing its motion. She had heard the joyous greeting to the sunrise, which was not the song of birds, but the ringing of the telephone a moment ago; she saw the start of day, not in the shining green of the branches outside, but in the glitter of chromium on the stove, the sparkle of a glass ashtray on a table, and the crisp whiteness of his shirt sleeves. Irresistibly, she heard the sound of a smile in her own voice, matching his, as she answered: “Good morning.”

He was gathering notes of penciled calculations from his desk and stuffing them into his pocket. “I have to go down to the powerhouse,” he said. “They’ve just phoned me that they’re having trouble with the ray screen. Your plane seems to have knocked it off key. I’ll be back in half an hour and then I’ll cook our breakfast.”

It was the casual simplicity of his voice, the manner of taking her presence and their domestic routine for granted, as if it were of no significance to them, that gave her the sense of an underscored significance and the feeling that he knew it.

She answered as casually, “If you’ll bring me the cane I left in the car, I’ll have breakfast ready for you by the time you come back.”

He glanced at her with a slight astonishment; his eyes moved from her bandaged ankle to the short sleeves of the blouse that left her arms bare to display the heavy bandage on her elbow. But the transparent blouse, the open collar, the hair falling down to the shoulders that seemed innocently naked under a thin film of cloth, made her look like a schoolgirl, not an invalid, and her posture made the bandages look irrelevant.

He smiled, not quite at her, but as if in amusement at some sudden memory of his own. “If you wish,” he said.

It was strange to be left alone in his house. Part of it was an emotion she had never experienced before: an awed respect that made her hesitantly conscious of her hands, as if to touch any object around her would be too great an intimacy. The other part was a reckless sense of ease, a sense of being at home in this place, as if she owned its owner.

It was strange to feel so pure a joy in the simple task of preparing a breakfast. The work seemed an end in itself, as if the motions of filling a coffee pot, squeezing oranges, slicing bread were performed for their own sake, for the sort of pleasure one expects, but seldom finds, in the motions of dancing. It startled her to realize that she had not experienced this kind of pleasure in her work since her days at the operator’s desk in Rockdale Station.

She was setting the table, when she saw the figure of a man hurrying up the path to the house, a swift, agile figure that leaped over boulders with the casual ease of a flight. He threw the door open, calling, “Hey, John!”—and stopped short as he saw her. He wore a dark blue sweater and slacks, he had gold hair and a face of such shocking perfection of beauty that she stood still, staring at him, not in admiration, at first, but in simple disbelief.

He looked at her as if he had not expected to find a woman in this house. Then she saw a look of recognition melting into a different kind of astonishment, part amusement, part triumph melting into a chuckle.

“Oh, have you joined us?” he asked.

“No,” she answered dryly, “I haven’t. I’m a scab.”

He laughed, like an adult at a child who uses technological words beyond its understanding. “If you know what you’re saying, you know that it’s not possible,” he said. “Not here.”

“I crashed the gate. Literally.”

He looked at her bandages, weighing the question, his glance almost insolent in its open curiosity. “When?”

“Yesterday.”

“How?”

“In a plane.”

“What were you doing in a plane in this part of the country?”

He had the direct, imperious manner of an aristocrat or a roughneck; he looked like one and was dressed like the other. She considered him for a moment, deliberately letting him wait. “I was trying to land on a prehistorical mirage,” she answered. “And I have.”

“You are a scab,” he said, and chuckled, as if grasping all the implications of the problem. “Where’s John?”

“Mr. Galt is at the powerhouse. He should be back any moment.”

He sat down in an armchair, asking no permission, as if he were at home. She turned silently to her work. He sat watching her movements with an open grin, as if the sight of her laying out cutlery on a kitchen table were the spectacle of some special paradox.

“What did Francisco say when he saw you here?” he asked.

She turned to him with a slight jolt, but answered evenly, “He is not here yet.”

“Not yet?” He seemed startled. “Are you sure?”

“So I was told.”

He lighted a cigarette. She wondered, watching him, what profession he had chosen, loved and abandoned in order to join this valley. She could make no guess; none seemed to fit; she caught herself in the preposterous feeling of wishing that he had no profession at all, because any work seemed too dangerous for his incredible kind of beauty. It was an impersonal feeling, she did not look at him as at a man, but as at an animated work of art—and it seemed to be a stressed indignity of the outer world that a perfection such as his should be subjected to the shocks, the strains, the scars reserved for any man who loved his work.

But the feeling seemed the more preposterous, because the lines of his face had the sort of hardness for which no danger on earth was a match, “No, Miss Taggart,” he said suddenly, catching her glance, “you’ve never seen me before.”

She was shocked to realize that she had been studying him openly.

“How do you happen to know who I am?” she asked.

“First, I’ve seen your pictures in the papers many times. Second, you’re the only woman left in the outer world, to the best of our knowledge, who’d be allowed to enter Galt’s Gulch. Third, you’re the only woman who’d have the courage—and prodigality—still to remain a scab.”

“What made you certain that I was a scab?”

“If you weren’t, you’d know that it’s not this valley, but the view of life held by men in the outer world that is a prehistorical mirage.”

They heard the sound of the motor and saw the car stopping below, in front of the house. She noticed the swiftness with which he rose to his feet at the sight of Galt in the car; if it were not for the obvious personal eagerness, it would have looked like an instinctive gesture of military respect.

She noticed the way Galt stopped, when he entered and saw his visitor. She noticed that Galt smiled, but that his voice was oddly low, almost solemn, as if weighted with unconfessed relief, when he said very quietly, “Hello.”

“Hi, John,” said the visitor gaily.

She noticed that their handshake came an instant too late and lasted an instant too long, like the handshake of men who had not been certain that their previous meeting would not be their last.

Galt turned to her. “Have you met?” he asked, addressing them both.

“Not exactly,” said the visitor.

“Miss Taggart, may I present Ragnar Danneskjold?”

She knew what her face had looked like, when she heard Danneskjold’s voice as from a great distance: “You don’t have to be frightened, Miss Taggart. I’m not dangerous to anyone in Galt’s Gulch.”

She could only shake her head, before she recaptured her voice to say, “It’s not what you’re doing to anyone... it’s what they’re doing to you... ”

His laughter swept her out of her moment’s stupor, “Be careful, Miss Taggart. If that’s how you’re beginning to feel, you won’t remain a scab for long.” He added, “But you ought to start by adopting the right things from the people in Galt’s Gulch, not their mistakes: they’ve spent twelve years worrying about me—needlessly.” He glanced at Galt.

“When did you get in?” asked Galt.

“Late last night.”

“Sit down. You’re going to have breakfast with us.”

“But where’s Francisco? Why isn’t he here yet?”

“I don’t know,” said Galt, frowning slightly. “I asked at the airport, just now. Nobody’s heard from him.”

As she turned to the kitchen, Galt moved to follow. “No,” she said, “it’s my job today.”

“Let me help you.”

“This is the place where one doesn’t ask for help, isn’t it?”

He smiled. “That’s right.”

She had never experienced the pleasure of motion, of walking as if her feet had no weight to carry, as if the support of the cane in her hand were merely a superfluous touch of elegance, the pleasure of feeling her steps trace swift, straight lines, of sensing the faultless, spontaneous precision of her gestures—as she experienced it while placing their food on the table in front of the two men. Her bearing told them that she knew they were watching her—she held her head like an actress on a stage, like a woman in a ballroom, like the winner of a silent contest.

“Francisco will be glad to know that it’s you who were his stand-in today,” said Danneskjold, when she joined them at the table.

“His what?”

“You see, today is June first, and the three of us—John, Francisco and I—have had breakfast together on every June first for twelve years.”

“Here?”

“Not when we started. But here, ever since this house was built eight years ago.” He shrugged, smiling. “For a man who has more centuries of tradition behind him than I have, it’s odd that Francisco should be the first to break our own tradition.”

“And Mr. Galt?” she asked. “How many centuries does he have behind him?”

“John? None at all. None behind him—but all of those ahead.”

“Never mind the centuries,” said Galt. “Tell me what sort of year you’ve had behind you. Lost any men?”

“No.”

“Lost any of your time?”

“You mean, was I wounded? No. I haven’t had a scratch since that one time, ten years ago, when I was still an amateur, which you ought to forget by now. I wasn’t in any danger whatever, this year—in fact, I was much more safe than if I were running a small-town drugstore under Directive 10-289.”

“Lost any battles?”

“No. The losses were all on the other side, this year. The looters lost most of their ships to me—and most of their men to you. You’ve had a good year, too, haven’t you? I know, I’ve kept track of it. Since our last breakfast together, you got everyone you wanted from the state of Colorado, and a few others besides, such as Ken Danagger, who was a great prize to get. But let me tell you about a still greater one, who is almost yours. You’re going to get him soon, because he’s hanging by a thin thread and is just about ready to fall at your feet. He’s a man who saved my life—so you can see how far he’s gone.”

Galt leaned back, his eyes narrowing. “So you weren’t in any danger whatever, were you?”

Danneskjold laughed. “Oh, I took a slight risk. It was worth it. It was the most enjoyable encounter I’ve ever had. I’ve been waiting to tell you about it in person. It’s a story you’ll want to hear. Do you know who the man was? Hank Rearden. I—”

“No!”

It was Galt’s voice; it was a command; the brief snap of sound had a tinge of violence neither of them had ever heard from him before.

“What?” asked Danneskjold softly, incredulously.

“Don’t tell me about it now.”

“But you’ve always said that Hank Rearden was the one man you wanted to see here most.”

“I still do. But you’ll tell me later.”

She studied Galt’s face intently, but she could find no clue, only a closed, impersonal look, either of determination or of control, that tightened the skin of his cheekbones and the line of his mouth. No matter what he knew about her, she thought, the only knowledge that could explain this, was a knowledge he had had no way of acquiring.

“You’ve met Hank Rearden?” she asked, turning to Danneskjold.

“And he saved your life?”

“Yes.”

“I want to hear about it.”

“I don’t,” said Galt.

“Why not?”

“You’re not one of us, Miss Taggart.”

“I see.” She smiled, with a faint touch of defiance. “Were you thinking that I might prevent you from getting Hank Rearden?”

“No, that was not what I was thinking.”

She noticed that Danneskjold was studying Galt’s face, as if he, too, found the incident inexplicable. Galt held his glance, deliberately and openly, as if challenging him to find the explanation and promising that he would fail. She knew that Danneskjold had failed, when she saw a faint crease of humor softening Galt’s eyelids.

“What else,” asked Galt, “have you accomplished this year?”

“I’ve defied the law of gravitation.”

“You’ve always done that. In what particular form now?”

“In the form of a flight from mid-Atlantic to Colorado in a plane loaded with gold beyond the safety point of its capacity. Wait till Midas sees the amount I have to deposit. My customers, this year, will become richer by— Say, have you told Miss Taggart that she’s one of my customers?”

“No, not yet. You may tell her, if you wish.”

“I’m—What did you say I am?” she asked.

“Don’t be shocked, Miss Taggart,” said Danneskjold. “And don’t object. I’m used to objections. I’m a sort of freak here, anyway. None of them approve of my particular method of fighting our battle. John doesn’t, Dr. Akston doesn’t. They think that my life is too valuable for it. But, you see, my father was a bishop—and of all his teachings there was only one sentence that I accepted: ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’”

“What do you mean?”

“That violence is not practical. If my fellow men believe that the force of the combined tonnage of their muscles is a practical means to rule me—let them learn the outcome of a contest in which there’s nothing but brute force on one side, and force ruled by a mind, on the other. Even John grants me that in our age I had the moral right to choose the course I’ve chosen. I am doing just what he is doing—only in my own way. He is withdrawing man’s spirit from the looters, I’m withdrawing the products of man’s spirit. He is depriving them of reason, I’m depriving them of wealth. He is draining the soul of the world, I’m draining its body. His is the lesson they have to learn, only I’m impatient and I’m hastening their scholastic progress. But, like John, I’m simply complying with their moral code and refusing to grant them a double standard at my expense. Or at Rearden’s expense. Or at yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About a method of taxing the income taxers. All methods of taxation are complex, but this one is very simple, because it’s the naked essence of all the others. Let me explain it to you.”

She listened. She heard a sparkling voice reciting, in the tone of a dryly meticulous bookkeeper, a report about financial transfers, bank accounts, income-tax returns, as if he were reading the dusty pages of a ledger—a ledger where every entry was made by means of offering his own blood as the collateral to be drained at any moment, at any slip of his bookkeeping pen. As she listened, she kept seeing the perfection of his face—and she kept thinking that this was the head on which the world had placed a price of millions for the purpose of delivering it to the rot of death... The face she had thought too beautiful for the scars of a productive career—she kept thinking numbly, missing half his words—the face too beautiful to risk... Then it struck her that his physical perfection was only a simple illustration, a childish lesson given to her in crudely obvious terms on the nature of the outer world and on the fate of any human value in a subhuman age. Whatever the justice or the evil of his course, she thought, how could they... no! she thought, his course was just, and this was the horror of it, that there was no other course for justice to select, that she could not condemn him, that she could neither approve nor utter a word of reproach.

“... and the names of my customers, Miss Taggart, were chosen slowly, one by one. I had to be certain of the nature of their character and career. On my list of restitution, your name was one of the first.”

She forced herself to keep her face expressionlessly tight, and she answered only, “I see.”

“Your account is one of the last left unpaid. It is here, at the Mulligan Bank, to be claimed by you on the day when you join us.”

“I see.”

“Your account, however, is not as large as some of the others, even though huge sums were extorted from you by force in the past twelve years. You will find—as it is marked on the copies oЈ your income-tax returns which Mulligan will hand over to you—that I have refunded only those taxes which you paid on the salary you earned as Operating Vice-President, but not the taxes you paid on your income from your Taggart Transcontinental stock. You deserved every penny of that stock, and in the days of your father I would have refunded every penny of your profit—but under your brother’s management, Taggart Transcontinental has taken its share of the looting, it has made profits by force, by means of government favors, subsidies, moratoriums, directives. You were not responsible for it, you were, in fact, the greatest victim of that policy—but I refund only the money which was made by pure productive ability, not the money any part of which was loot taken by force.”

“I see.”

They had finished their breakfast. Danneskjold lighted a cigarette and watched her for an instant through the first jet of smoke, as if he knew the violence of the conflict in her mind—then he grinned at Galt and rose to his feet.

“I’ll run along,” he said. “My wife is waiting for me.”

“What?” she gasped.

“My wife,” he repeated gaily, as if he had not understood the reason of her shock.

“Who is your wife?”

“Kay Ludlow.”

The implications that struck her were more than she could bear to consider. “When... when were you married?”

“Four years ago.”

“How could you show yourself anywhere long enough to go through a wedding ceremony?”

“We were married here, by Judge Narragansett.”

“How can”—she tried to stop, but the words burst involuntarily, in helplessly indignant protest, whether against him, fate or the outer world, she could not tell—“how can she live through eleven months of thinking that you, at any moment, might be... ?” She did not finish.

He was smiling, but she saw the enormous solemnity of that which he and his wife had needed to earn their right to this kind of smile. “She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction.

We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it—and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.”

Galt accompanied him to the door, then came back, sat down at the table and in a leisurely manner reached for another cup of coffee.

She shot to her feet, as if flung by a jet of pressure breaking a safety valve. “Do you think that I’ll ever accept his money?”

He waited until the curving streak of coffee had filled his cup, then glanced up at her and answered, “Yes, I think so.”

“Well, I won’t! I won’t let him risk his life for it!”

“You have no choice about that.”

“I have the choice never to claim it!”

“Yes, you have.”

“Then it will lie in that bank till doomsday!”

“No, it won’t. If you don’t claim it, some part of it—a very small part—will be turned over to me in your name.”

“In my name? Why?”

“To pay for your room and board.”

She stared at him, her look of anger switching to bewilderment, then dropped slowly back on her chair.

He smiled. “How long did you think you were going to stay here, Miss Taggart?” He saw her startled look of helplessness. “You haven’t thought of it? I have. You’re going to stay here for a month. For the one month of our vacation, like the rest of us. I am not asking for your consent—you did not ask for ours when you came here. You broke our rules, so you’ll have to take the consequences. Nobody leaves the valley during this month. I could let you go, of course, but I won’t.

There’s no rule demanding that I hold you, but by forcing your way here, you’ve given me the right to any choice I make—and I’m going to hold you simply because I want you here. If, at the end of a month, you decide that you wish to go back, you will be free to do so. Not until then.”

She sat straight, the planes of her face relaxed, the shape of her mouth softened by the faint, purposeful suggestion of a smile; it was the dangerous smile of an adversary, but her eyes were coldly brilliant and veiled at once, like the eyes of an adversary who fully intends to fight, but hopes to lose.

“Very well,” she said, “I shall charge you for your room and board—it is against our rules to provide the unearned sustenance of another human being. Some of us have wives and children, but there is a mutual trade involved in that, and a mutual payment”—he glanced at her—“of a kind I am not entitled to collect. So I shall charge you fifty cents a day and you will pay me when you accept the account that lies in your name at the Mulligan Bank. If you don’t accept the account, Mulligan will charge your debt against it and he will give me the money when I ask for it.”

“I shall comply with your terms,” she answered; her voice had the shrewd, confident, deliberating slowness of a trader. “But I shall not permit the use of that money for my debts.”

“How else do you propose to comply?”

“I propose to earn my room and board.”

“By what means?”

“By working.”

“In what capacity?”

“In the capacity of your cook and housemaid.”

For the first time, she saw him take the shock of the unexpected, in a manner and with a violence she had not foreseen. It was only an explosion of laughter on his part—but he laughed as if he were hit beyond his defenses, much beyond the immediate meaning of her words; she felt that she had struck his past, tearing loose some memory and meaning of his own which she could not know. He laughed as if he were seeing some distant image, as if he were laughing in its face, as if this were his victory—and hers.

“If you will hire me,” she said, her face severely polite, her tone harshly clear, impersonal and businesslike, “I shall cook your meals, clean your house, do your laundry and perform such other duties as are required of a servant—in exchange for my room, board and such money as I will need for some items of clothing. I may be slightly handicapped by my injuries for the next few days, but that will not last and I will be able to do the job fully.”

“Is that what you want to do?” he asked.

“That is what I want to do—” she answered, and stopped before she uttered the rest of the answer in her mind: more than anything else in the world.

He was still smiling, it was a smile of amusement, but it was as if amusement could be transmuted into some shining glory. “All right, Miss Taggart,” he said, “I’ll hire you.”

She inclined her head in a dryly formal acknowledgment. “Thank you.”

“I will pay you ten dollars a month, in addition to your room and board.”

“Very well.”

“I shall be the first man in this valley to hire a servant.” He got up, reached into his pocket and threw a five-dollar gold piece down on the table. “As advance on your wages,” he said.

She was startled to discover, as her hand reached for the gold piece, that she felt the eager, desperate, tremulous hope of a young girl on her first job: the hope that she would be able to deserve it.

“Yes, sir,” she said, her eyes lowered.

Owen Kellogg arrived on the afternoon of her third day in the valley.

She did not know which shocked him most: the sight of her standing on the edge of the airfield as he descended from the plane—the sight of her clothes: her delicate, transparent blouse, tailored by the most expensive shop in New York, and the wide, cotton-print skirt she had bought in the valley for sixty cents—her cane, her bandages or the basket of groceries on her arm.

He descended among a group of men, he saw her, he stopped, then ran to her as if flung forward by some emotion so strong that, whatever its nature, it looked like terror.

“Miss Taggart...” he whispered—and said nothing else, while she laughed, trying to explain how she had come to beat him to his destination.

He listened, as if it were irrelevant, and then he uttered the thing from which he had to recover, “But we thought you were dead.”

“Who thought it?”

“All of us... I mean, everybody in the outside world.”

Then she suddenly stopped smiling, while his voice began to recapture his story and his first sound of joy.

“Miss Taggart, don’t you remember? You told me to phone Winston, Colorado, and to tell them that you’d be there by noon of the next day. That was to be the day before yesterday, May thirty-first. But you did not reach Winston—and by late afternoon, the news was on all the radios that you were lost in a plane crash somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.”

She nodded slowly, grasping the events she had not thought of considering.

“I heard it aboard the Comet,” he said. “At a small station in the middle of New Mexico. The conductor held us there for an hour, while I helped him to check the story on long-distance phones. He was hit by the news just as I was. They all were—the train crew, the station agent, the switchmen. They huddled around me while I called the city rooms of newspapers in Denver and New York. We didn’t learn much.

Only that you had left the Afton airfield just before dawn on May thirty-first, that you seemed to be following some stranger’s plane, that the attendant had seen you go off southeast—and that nobody had seen you since... And that searching parties were combing the Rockies for the wreckage of your plane.”

She asked involuntarily, “Did the Comet reach San Francisco?”

“I don’t know. She was crawling north through Arizona, when I gave up. There were too many delays, too many things going wrong, and a total confusion of orders. I got off and spent the night hitchhiking my way to Colorado, bumming rides on trucks, on buggies, on horse carts, to get there on time—to get to our meeting place, I mean, where we gather for Midas’ ferry plane to pick us up and bring us here.”

She started walking slowly up the path toward the car she had left in front of Hammond’s Grocery Market. Kellogg followed, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped a little, slowing down with their steps, as if there were something they both wished to delay.

“I got a job for Jeff Alien,” he said; his voice had the peculiarly solemn tone proper for saying: I have carried out your last will. “Your agent at Laurel grabbed him and put him to work the moment we got there. The agent needed every able-bodied—no, able-minded—man he could find.”

They had reached the car, but she did not get in.

“Miss Taggart, you weren’t hurt badly, were you? Did you say you crashed, but it wasn’t serious?”

“No, not serious at all. I’ll be able to get along without Mr. Mulligan’s car by tomorrow—and in a day or two I won’t need this thing, either.” She swung her cane and tossed it contemptuously into the car.

They stood in silence; she was waiting.

“The last long-distance call I made from that station in New Mexico,” he said slowly, “was to Pennsylvania. I spoke to Hank Rearden. I told him everything I knew. He listened, and then there was a pause, and then he said, ‘Thank you for calling me.’” Kellogg’s eyes were lowered; he added, “I never want to hear that kind of pause again as long as I live.”

He raised his eyes to hers; there was no reproach in his glance, only the knowledge of that which he had not suspected when he heard her request, but had guessed since.

“Thank you,” she said, and threw the door of the car open. “Can I give you a lift? I have to get back and get dinner ready before my employer comes home.”

It was in the first moment of returning to Galt’s house, of standing alone in the silent, sun-filled room, that she faced the full meaning of what she felt. She looked at the window, at the mountains barring the sky in the east. She thought of Hank Rearden as he sat at his desk, now, two thousand miles away, his face tightened into a retaining wall against agony, as it had been tightened under all the blows of all his years—and she felt a desperate wish to fight his battle, to fight for him, for his past, for that tension of his face and the courage that fed it—as she wanted to fight for the Comet that crawled by a last effort across a desert on a crumbling track. She shuddered, closing her eyes, feeling as if she were guilty of double treason, feeling as if she were suspended in space between this valley and the rest of the earth, with no right to either.

The feeling vanished when she sat facing Galt across the dinner table. He was watching her, openly and with an untroubled look, as if her presence were normal—and as if the sight of her were all he wished to allow into his consciousness.

She leaned back a little, as if complying with the meaning of his glance, and said dryly, efficiently, in deliberate denial, “I have checked your shirts and found one with two buttons missing, and another with the left elbow worn through. Do you wish me to mend them?”

“Why, yes—if you can do it.”

“I can do it.”

It did not seem to alter the nature of his glance; it merely seemed to stress its satisfaction, as if this were what he had wished her to say—except that she was not certain whether satisfaction was the name for the thing she saw in his eyes and fully certain that he had not wished her to say anything.

Beyond the window, at the edge of the table, storm clouds had wiped out the last remnants of light in the eastern sky. She wondered why she felt a sudden reluctance to look out, why she felt as if she wanted to cling to the golden patches of light on the wood of the table, on the buttered crust of the rolls, on the copper coffee pot, on Galt’s hair—to cling as to a small island on the edge of a void.

Then she heard her own voice asking suddenly, involuntarily, and she knew that this was the treason she had wanted to escape, “Do you permit any communication with the outside world?”

“No.”

“Not any? Not even a note without return address?”

“No.”

“Not even a message, if no secret of yours were given away?”

“Not from here. Not during this month. Not to outsiders at any time.”

She noticed that she was avoiding his eyes, and she forced herself to lift her head and face him. His glance had changed; it was watchful, unmoving, implacably perceptive. He asked, looking at her as if he knew the reason of her query, “Do you wish to ask for a special exception?”

“No,” she answered, holding his glance.

Next morning, after breakfast, when she sat in her room, carefully placing a patch on the sleeve of Galt’s shirt, with her door closed, not to let him see her fumbling effort at an unfamiliar task, she heard the sound of a car stopping in front of the house.

She heard Galt’s steps hurrying across the living room, she heard him jerk the entrance door open and call out with the joyous anger of relief: “It’s about time!”

She rose to her feet, but stopped: she heard his voice, its tone abruptly changed and grave, as if in answer to the shock of some sight confronting him: “What’s the matter?”

“Hello, John,” said a clear, quiet voice that sounded steady, but weighted with exhaustion.

She sat down on her bed, feeling suddenly drained of strength: the voice was Francisco’s.

She heard Galt asking, his tone severe with concern, “What is it?”

“I’ll tell you afterwards.”

“Why are you so late?”

“I have to leave again in an hour.”

“To leave?”

“John, I just came to tell you that I won’t be able to stay here this year.”

There was a pause, then Galt asked gravely, his voice low, “Is it as bad as that—whatever it is?”

“Yes. I... I might be back before the month is over. I don’t know.” He added, with the sound of a desperate effort, “I don’t know whether to hope to be done with it quickly or... or not.”

“Francisco, could you stand a shock right now?”

“I? Nothing could shock me now.”

“There’s a person, here, in my guest room, whom you have to see.

It will be a shock to you, so I think I’d better warn you in advance that this person is still a scab.”

“What? A scab? In your house?”

“Let me tell you how—”

“That’s something I want to see for myself!”

She heard Francisco’s contemptuous chuckle and the rush of his steps, she saw her door flung open, and she noticed dimly that it was Galt who closed it, leaving them alone.

She did not know how long Francisco stood looking at her, because the first moment that she grasped fully was when she saw him on his knees, holding onto her, his face pressed to her legs, the moment when she felt as if the shudder that ran through his body and left him still, had run into hers and made her able to move.

She saw, in astonishment, that her hand was moving gently over his hair, while she was thinking that she had no right to do it and feeling as if a current of serenity were flowing from her hand, enveloping them both, smoothing the past. He did not move, he made no sound, as if the act of holding her said everything he had to say.

When he raised his head, he looked as she had felt when she had opened her eyes in the valley: he looked as if no pain had ever existed in the world. He was laughing.

“Dagny, Dagny, Dagny”—his voice sounded, not as if a confession resisted for years were breaking out, but as if he were repeating the long since known, laughing at the pretense that it had ever been unsaid—“of course I love you. Were you afraid when he made me say it?

I’ll say it as often as you wish—I love you, darling, I love you, I always will—don’t be afraid for me, I don’t care if I’ll never have you again, what does that matter?—you’re alive and you’re here and you know everything now. And it’s so simple, isn’t it? Do you see what it was and why I had to desert you?” His arm swept out to point at the valley. “There it is—it’s your earth, your kingdom, your kind of world—Dagny, I’ve always loved you and that I deserted you, that was my love.”

He took her hands and pressed them to his lips and held them, not moving, not as a kiss, but as a long moment of rest—as if the effort of speech were a distraction from the fact of her presence, and as if he were torn by too many things to say, by the pressure of all the words stored in the silence of years.

“The women I chased—you didn’t believe that, did you? I’ve never touched one of them—but I think you knew it, I think you’ve known it all along. The playboy—it was a part that I had to play in order not to let the looters suspect me while I was destroying d’Anconia Copper in plain sight of the whole world. That’s the joker in their system, they’re out to fight any man of honor and ambition, but let them see a worthless rotter and they think he’s a friend, they think he’s safe—safe!—that’s their view of life, but are they learning!—are they learning whether evil is safe and incompetence practical!...

Dagny, it was the night when I knew, for the first time, that I loved you—it was then that I knew I had to go. It was when you entered my hotel room, that night, when I saw what you looked like, what you were, what you meant to me—and what awaited you in the future. Had you been less, you might have stopped me for a while. But it was you, you who were the final argument that made me leave you. I asked for your help, that night—against John Galt. But I knew that you were his best weapon against me, though neither you nor he could know it.

You were everything that he was seeking, everything he told us to live for or die, if necessary... I was ready for him, when he called me suddenly to come to New York, that spring. I had not heard from him for some time. He was fighting the same problem I was. He solved it.

... Do you remember? It was the time when you did not hear from me for three years. Dagny, when I took over my father’s business, when I began to deal with the whole industrial system of the world, it was then that I began to see the nature of the evil I had suspected, but thought too monstrous to believe. I saw the tax-collecting vermin that had grown for centuries like mildew on d’Anconia Copper, draining us by no right that anyone could name—I saw the government regulations passed to cripple me, because I was successful, and to help my competitors, because they were loafing failures—I saw the labor unions who won every claim against me, by reason of my ability to make their livelihood possible—I saw that any man’s desire for money he could not earn was regarded as a righteous wish, but if he earned it, it was damned as greed—I saw the politicians who winked at me, telling me not to worry, because I could just work a little harder and outsmart them all. I looked past the profits of the moment, and I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer, that the parasites who fed on me were being fed upon in their turn, that they were caught in their own trap—and that there was no reason for it, no answer known to anyone, that the sewer pipes of the world, draining its productive blood, led into some dank fog nobody had dared to pierce, while people merely shrugged and said that life on earth could be nothing but evil. And then I saw that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth—all of it was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence, that man has no right to exist except for the sake of others... I knew it. I saw no way to fight it. John found the way. There were just the two of us with him, the night when we came to New York in answer to his call, Ragnar and I. He told us what we had to do and what sort of men we had to reach. He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. He did not ask us to join him at once. He told us to think it over and to weigh everything it would do to our lives. I gave him my answer on the morning of the second day, and Ragnar a few hours later, in the afternoon... Dagny, that was the morning after our last night together. I had seen, in a manner of vision that I couldn’t escape, what it was that I had to fight for.

It was for the way you looked that night, for the way you talked about your railroad—for the way you had looked when we tried to see the skyline of New York from the top of a rock over the Hudson—I had to save you, to clear the way for you, to let you find your city—not to let you stumble the years of your life away, struggling on through a poisoned fog, with your eyes still held straight ahead, still looking as they had looked in the sunlight, struggling on to find, at the end of your road, not the towers of a city, but a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by means of swallowing the gin your life had gone to pay for! You—to know no joy in order that he may know it? You—to serve as fodder for the pleasure of others? You—as the means for the subhuman as the end? Dagny, that was what I saw and that was what I couldn’t let them do to you! Not to you, not to any child who had your kind of look when he faced the future, not to any man who had your spirit and was able to experience a moment of being proudly, guiltlessly, confidently, joyously alive. That was my love, that state of the human spirit, and I left you to fight for it, and I knew that if I were to lose you, it was still you that I would be winning with every year of the battle. But you see it now, don’t you? You’ve seen this valley. It’s the place we set out to reach when we were children, you and I. We’ve reached it. What else can I ask for now? Just to see you here—did John say you’re still a scab?—oh well, it’s only a matter of tune, but you’ll be one of us, because you’ve always been, if you don’t see it fully, we’ll wait, I don’t care—so long as you’re alive, so long as I don’t have to go on flying over the Rockies, looking for the wreckage of your plane!”

She gasped a little, realizing why he had not come to the valley on time.

He laughed. “Don’t look like that. Don’t look at me as if I were a wound that you’re afraid to touch.”

“Francisco, I’ve hurt you in so many different ways—”

“No! No, you haven’t hurt me—and he hasn’t either, don’t say anything about it, it’s he who’s hurt, but we’ll save him and he’ll come here, too, where he belongs, and he’ll know, and then he, too, will be able to laugh about it. Dagny, I didn’t expect you to wait, I didn’t hope, I knew the chance I’d taken, and if it had to be anyone, I’m glad it’s he.”

She closed her eyes, pressing her lips together not to moan.

“Darling, don’t! Don’t you see that I’ve accepted it?”

But it isn’t—she thought—it isn’t he, and I can’t tell you the truth, because it’s a man who might never hear it from me and whom I might never have.

“Francisco, I did love you—” she said, and caught her breath, shocked, realizing that she had not intended to say it and, simultaneously, that this was not the tense she had wanted to use.

“But you do,” he said calmly, smiling. “You still love me—even if there’s one expression of it that you’ll always feel and want, but will not give me any longer. I’m still what I was, and you’ll always see it, and you’ll always grant me the same response, even if there’s a greater one that you grant to another man. No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won’t be treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it’s the same payment in answer to the same values. No matter what happens in the future, we’ll always be what we were to each other, you and I, because you’ll always love me.”

“Francisco,” she whispered, “do you know that?”

“Of course. Don’t you understand it now? Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor—by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence—and every achievement is an expression of it. Look around you. Do you see how much is open to us here, on an unobstructed earth? Do you see how much I am free to do, to experience, to achieve? Do you see that all of it is part of what you are to me—as I am part of it for you? And if I’ll see you smile with admiration at a new copper smelter that I built, it will be another form of what I felt when I lay in bed beside you. Will I want to sleep with you? Desperately. Will I envy the man who does? Sure. But what does that matter? It’s so much—just to have you here, to love you and to be alive.”

Her eyes lowered, her face stern, holding her head bowed as in an act of reverence, she said slowly, as if fulfilling a solemn promise, “Will you forgive me?”

He looked astonished, then chuckled gaily, remembering, and answered, “Not yet. There’s nothing to forgive, but I’ll forgive it when you join us.”

He rose, he drew her to her feet—and when his arms closed about her, their kiss was the summation of their past, its end and their seal of acceptance.

Galt turned to them from across the living room, when they came out. He had been standing at a window, looking at the valley—and she felt certain that he had stood there all that time. She saw his eyes studying their faces, his glance moving slowly from one to the other.

His face relaxed a little at the sight of the change in Francisco’s.

Francisco smiled, asking him, “Why do you stare at me?”

“Do you know what you looked like when you came in?”

“Oh, did I? That’s because I hadn’t slept for three nights. John, will you invite me to dinner? I want to know how this scab of yours got here, but I think that I might collapse sound asleep in the middle of a sentence—even though right now I feel as if I’ll never need any sleep at all—so I think I’d better go home and stay there till evening.”

Galt was watching him with a faint smile. “But aren’t you going to leave the valley in an hour?”

“What? No...” he said mildly, in momentary astonishment. “No!” he laughed exultantly. “I don’t have to! That’s right, I haven’t told you what it was, have I? I was searching for Dagny. For... for the wreck of her plane. She’d been reported lost in a crash in the Rockies.”

“I see,” said Galt quietly.

“I could have thought of anything, except that she would choose to crash in Galt’s Gulch,” Francisco said happily; he had the tone of that joyous relief which almost relishes the horror of the past, defying it by means of the present. “I kept flying over the district between Afton, Utah, and Winston, Colorado, over every peak and crevice of it, over every remnant of a car in any gully below, and whenever I saw one, I—” He stopped; it looked like a shudder. “Then at night, we went out on foot—the searching parties of railroad men from Winston—we went climbing at random, with no clues, no plan, on and on, until it was daylight again, and—” He shrugged, trying to dismiss it and to smile. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst—”

He stopped short; his smile vanished and a dim reflection of the look he had worn for three days came back to his face, as if at the sudden presence of an image he had forgotten.

After a long moment, he turned to Galt. “John,” his voice sounded peculiarly solemn, “could we notify those outside that Dagny is alive... in case there’s somebody who... who’d feel as I did?”

Galt was looking straight at him. “Do you wish to give any outsider any relief from the consequences of remaining outside?”

Francisco dropped his eyes, but answered firmly, “No.”

“Pity, Francisco?”

“Yes. Forget it. You’re right.”

Galt turned away with a movement that seemed oddly out of character: it had the unrhythmical abruptness of the involuntary.

He did not turn back; Francisco watched him in astonishment, then asked softly, “What’s the matter?”

Galt turned and looked at him for a moment, not answering. She could not identify the emotion that softened the lines of Galt’s face: it had the quality of a smile, of gentleness, of pain, and of something greater that seemed to make these concepts superfluous.

“Whatever any of us has paid for this battle,” said Galt, “you’re the one who’s taken the hardest beating, aren’t you?”

“Who? I?” Francisco grinned with shocked, incredulous amusement.

“Certainly not! What’s the matter with you?” He chuckled and added, “Pity, John?”

“No,” said Galt firmly.

She saw Francisco watching him with a faint, puzzled frown—because Galt had said it, looking, not at him, but at her.

The emotional sum that struck her as an immediate impression of Francisco’s house, when she entered it for the first time, was not the sum she had once drawn from the sight of its silent, locked exterior. She felt, not a sense of tragic loneliness, but of invigorating brightness. The rooms were bare and crudely simple, the house seemed built with the skill, the decisiveness and the impatience typical of Francisco; it looked like a frontiersman’s shanty thrown together to serve as a mere springboard for a long flight into the future—a future where so great a field of activity lay waiting that no time could be wasted on the comfort of its start. The place had the brightness, not of a home, but of a fresh wooden scaffolding erected to shelter the birth of a skyscraper.

Francisco, in shirt sleeves, stood in the middle of his twelve-foot square living room, with the look of a host in a palace. Of all the places where she had ever seen him, this was the background that seemed most properly his. Just as the simplicity of his clothes, added to his bearing, gave him the air of a superlative aristocrat, so the crudeness of the room gave it the appearance of the most patrician retreat; a single royal touch was added to the crudeness: two ancient silver goblets stood in a small niche cut in a wall of bare logs; their ornate design had required the luxury of some craftsman’s long and costly labor, more labor than had gone to build the shanty, a design dimmed by the polish of more centuries than had gone to grow the log wall’s pines. In the midst of that room, Francisco’s easy, natural manner had a touch of quiet pride, as if his smile were silently saying to her: This is what I am and what I have been all these years.

She looked up at the silver goblets.

“Yes,” he said, in answer to her silent guess, “they belonged to Sebastian d’Anconia and his wife. That’s the only thing I brought here from my palace in Buenos Aires. That, and the crest over the door.

It’s all I wanted to save. Everything else will go, in a very few months now.” He chuckled. “They’ll seize it, all of it, the last dregs of d’Anconia Copper, but they’ll be surprised. They won’t find much for their trouble. And as to that palace, they won’t be able to afford even its heating bill.”

“And then?” she asked. “Where will you go from there?”

“I? I will go to work for d’Anconia Copper.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember that old slogan: ‘The king is dead, long live the king’? When the carcass of my ancestors’ property is out of the way, then my mine will become the young new body of d’Anconia Copper, the kind of property my ancestors had wanted, had worked for, had deserved, but had never owned.”

“Your mine? What mine? Where?”

“Here,” he said, pointing toward the mountain peaks. “Didn’t you know it?”

“No.”

“I own a copper mine that the looters won’t reach. It’s here, in these mountains. I did the prospecting, I discovered it, I broke the first excavation. It was over eight years ago. I was the first man to whom Midas sold land in this valley. I bought that mine. I started it with my own hands, as Sebastian d’Anconia had started. I have a superintendent in charge of it now, who used to be my best metallurgist in Chile.

The mine produces all the copper we require. My profits are deposited at the Mulligan Bank. That will be all I’ll have, a few months from now. That will be all I’ll need.”—to conquer the world, was the way his voice sounded on his last sentence—and she marveled at the difference between that sound and the shameful, mawkish tone, half-whine, half-threat, the tone of beggar and thug combined, which the men of their century had given to the word “need.”

“Dagny,” he was saying, standing at the window, as if looking out at the peaks, not of mountains, but of time, “the rebirth of d’Anconia Copper—and of the world—has to start here, in the United States. This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man’s mind. This country was built on the supremacy of reason—and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world. It will have to do so again. The first step of d’Anconia Copper, as of any other human value, has to come from here—because the rest of the earth has reached the consummation of the beliefs it has held through the ages: mystic faith, the supremacy of the irrational, which has but two monuments at the end of its course: the lunatic asylum and the graveyard... Sebastian d’Anconia committed one error: he accepted a system which declared that the property he had earned by right, was to be his, not by right, but by permission. His descendants paid for that error. I have made the last payment... I think that I will see the day when, growing out from their root in this soil, the mines, the smelters, the ore docks of d’Anconia Copper will spread again through the world and down to my native country, and I will be the first to start my country’s rebuilding.

I may see it, but I cannot be certain. No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason. It may be that at the end of my life, I shall have established nothing but this single mine—d’Anconia Copper No. 1, Galt’s Gulch, Colorado, U.S.A. But, Dagny, do you remember that my ambition was to double my father’s production of copper? Dagny, if at the end of my life, I produce but one pound of copper a year, I will be richer than my father, richer than all my ancestors with all their thousands of tons—because that one pound will be mine by right and will be used to maintain a world that knows it!”

This was the Francisco of their childhood, in bearing, in manner, in the unclouded brilliance of his eyes—and she found herself questioning him about his copper mine, as she had questioned him about his industrial projects on their walks on the shore of the Hudson, recapturing the sense of an unobstructed future.

“I’ll take you to see the mine,” he said, “as soon as your ankle recovers completely. We have to climb a steep trail to get there, just a mule trail, there’s no truck road as yet. Let me show you the new smelter I’m designing. I’ve been working on it for some time, it’s too complex for our present volume of production, but when the mine’s output grows to justify it—just take a look at the time, labor and money that it will save!”

They were sitting together on the floor, bending over the sheets of paper he spread before her, studying the intricate sections of the smelter—with the same joyous earnestness they had once brought to the study of scraps in a junk yard.

She leaned forward just as he moved to reach for another sheet, and she found herself leaning against his shoulder. Involuntarily, she held still for one instant, no longer than for a small break in the flow of a single motion, while her eyes rose to his. He was looking down at her, neither hiding what he felt nor implying any further demand. She drew back, knowing that she had felt the same desire as his.

Then, still holding the recaptured sensation of what she had felt for him in the past, she grasped a quality that had always been part of it, now suddenly clear to her for the first time: if that desire was a celebration of one’s life, then what she had felt for Francisco had always been a celebration of her future, like a moment of splendor gained in part payment of an unknown, total, affirming some promise to come. In the instant when she grasped it, she knew also the only desire she had ever experienced not in token of the future but of the full and final present. She knew it by means of an image—the image of a man’s figure standing at the door of a small granite structure. The final form of the promise that had kept her moving, she thought, was the man who would, perhaps, remain a promise never to be reached.

But this—she thought in consternation—was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach. But she had come to it and she could find no answer.

She could not give him up or give up the world—she thought, looking at Galt, that evening. The answer seemed harder to find in his presence. She felt that no problem existed, that nothing could stand beside the fact of seeing him and nothing would ever have the power to make her leave—and, simultaneously, that she would have no right to look at him if she were to renounce her railroad. She felt that she owned him, that the unnamed had been understood between them from the start—and, simultaneously, that he was able to vanish from her life and, on some future street of the outside world, to pass her by in unweighted indifference.

She noted that he did not question her about Francisco. When she spoke of her visit, she could find no reaction in his face, neither of approval nor of resentment. It seemed to her that she caught an imperceptible shading in his gravely attentive expression: he looked as if this were a matter about which he did not choose to feel.

Her faint apprehension grew into a question mark, and the question mark turned into a drill, cutting deeper and deeper into her mind through the evenings that followed—when Galt left the house and she remained alone. He went out every other night, after dinner, not telling her where he went, returning at midnight or later. She tried not to allow herself fully to discover with what tension and restlessness she waited for his return. She did not ask him where he spent his evenings. The reluctance that stopped her was her too urgent desire to know; she kept silent in some dimly intentional form of defiance, half in defiance of him, half of her own anxiety.

She would not acknowledge the things she feared or give them the solid shape of words, she knew them only by the ugly, nagging pull of an unadmitted emotion. Part of it was a savage resentment, of a kind she had never experienced before, which was her answer to the dread that there might be a woman in his life; yet the resentment was softened by some quality of health in the thing she feared, as if the threat could be fought and even, if need be, accepted. But there was another, uglier dread: the sordid shape of self-sacrifice, the suspicion, not to be uttered about him, that he wished to remove himself from her path and let its emptiness force her back to the man who was his best-loved friend.

Days passed before she spoke of it. Then, at dinner, on an evening when he was to leave, she became suddenly aware of the peculiar pleasure she experienced while watching him eat the food she had prepared—and suddenly, involuntarily, as if that pleasure gave her a right she dared not identify, as if enjoyment, not pain, broke her resistance, she heard herself asking him, “What is it you’re doing every other evening?”

He answered simply, as if he had taken for granted that she knew it, “Lecturing.”

“What?”

“Giving a course of lectures on physics, as I do every year during this month. It’s my... What are you laughing at?” he asked, seeing the look of relief, of silent laughter that did not seem to be directed at his words—and then, before she answered, he smiled suddenly, as if he had guessed the answer, she saw some particular, intensely personal quality in his smile, which was almost a quality of insolent intimacy—in contrast to the calmly impersonal, casual manner with which he went on. “You know that this is the month when we all trade the achievements of our real professions. Richard Halley is to give concerts, Kay Ludlow is to appear in two plays written by authors who do not write for the outside world—and I give lectures, reporting on the work I’ve done during the year.”

“Free lectures?”

“Certainly not. It’s ten dollars per person for the course.”

“I want to hear you.”

He shook his head. “No. You’ll be allowed to attend the concerts, the plays or any form of presentation for your own enjoyment, but not my lectures or any other sale of ideas which you might carry out of this valley. Besides, my customers, or students, are only those who have a practical purpose in taking my course: Dwight Sanders, Lawrence Hammond, Dick McNamara, Owen Kellogg, a few others. I’ve added one beginner this year: Quentin Daniels.”

“Really?” she said, almost with a touch of jealousy. “How can he afford anything that expensive?”

“On credit. I’ve given him a time-payment plan. He’s worth it.”

“Where do you lecture?”

“In the hangar, on Dwight Sanders’ farm.”

“And where do you work during the year?”

“In my laboratory.”

She asked cautiously, “Where is your laboratory? Here, in the valley?”

He held her eyes for a moment, letting her see that his glance was amused and that he knew her purpose, then answered, “No.”

“You’ve lived in the outside world for all of these twelve years?”

“Yes.”

“Do you”—the thought seemed unbearable—“do you hold some such job as the others?”

“Oh yes.” The amusement in his eyes seemed stressed by some special meaning.

“Don’t tell me that you’re a second assistant bookkeeper!”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I hold the kind of job that the world wishes me to hold.”

“Where?”

He shook his head. “No, Miss Taggart. If you decide to leave the valley, this is one of the things that you are not to know.”

He smiled again with that insolently personal quality which now seemed to say that he knew the threat contained in his answer and what it meant to her, then he rose from the table.

When he had gone, she felt as if the motion of time were an oppressive weight in the stillness of the house, like a stationary, half-solid mass slithering slowly into some faint elongation by a tempo that left her no measure to know whether minutes had passed or hours. She lay half-stretched in an armchair of the living room, crumpled by that heavy, indifferent lassitude which is not the will to laziness, but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy.

That special pleasure she had felt in watching him eat the food she had prepared—she thought, lying still, her eyes closed, her mind moving, like time, through some realm of veiled slowness—it had been the pleasure of knowing that she had provided him with a sensual enjoyment, that one form of his body’s satisfaction had come from her.

... There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man... oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of... but what have they made of it, the preachers of woman’s duty?... The castrated performance of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman’s proper virtue—while that which gave it meaning and sanction was held as a shameful sin... the work of dealing with grease, steam and slimy peelings in a reeking kitchen was held to be a spiritual matter, an act of compliance with her moral duty—while the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom was held to be a physical indulgence, an act of surrender to an animal instinct, with no glory, meaning or pride of spirit to be claimed by the animals involved.

She leaped abruptly to her feet. She did not want to think of the outer world or of its moral code. But she knew that that was not the subject of her thoughts. And she did not want to think of the subject her mind was intent on pursuing, the subject to which it kept returning against her will, by some will of its own...

She paced the room, hating the ugly, jerky, uncontrolled looseness of her movements—torn between the need to let her motion break the stillness, and the knowledge that this was not the form of break she wanted. She lighted cigarettes, for an instant’s illusion of purposeful action—and discarded them within another instant, feeling the weary distaste of a substitute purpose. She looked at the room like a restless beggar, pleading with physical objects to give her a motive, wishing she could find something to clean, to mend, to polish—while knowing that no task was worth the effort. When nothing seems worth the effort—said some stern voice in her mind—it’s a screen to hide a wish that’s worth too much; what do you want?... She snapped a match, viciously jerking the flame to the tip of a cigarette she noticed hanging, unlighted, in the corner of her mouth... What do you want?—repeated the voice that sounded severe as a judge. I want him to come back!—she answered, throwing the words, as a soundless cry, at some accuser within her, almost as one would throw a bone to a pursuing beast, in the hope of distracting it from pouncing upon the rest.

I want him back—she said softly, in answer to the accusation that there was no reason for so great an impatience... I want him back—she said pleadingly, in answer to the cold reminder that her answer did not balance the judge’s scale... I want him back!—she cried defiantly, fighting not to drop the one superfluous, protective word in that sentence.

She felt her head drooping with exhaustion, as after a prolonged beating. The cigarette she saw between her fingers had burned the mere length of half an inch. She ground it out and fell into the armchair again.

I’m not evading it—she thought—I’m not evading it, it’s just that I can see no way to any answer... That which you want—said the voice, while she stumbled through a thickening fog—is yours for the taking, but anything less than your full acceptance, anything less than your full conviction, is a betrayal of everything he is... Then let him damn me—she thought, as if the voice were now lost in the fog and would not hear her—let him damn me tomorrow... I want him... back... She heard no answer, because her head had fallen softly against the chair; she was asleep.

When she opened her eyes, she saw him standing three feet away, looking down at her, as if he had been watching her for some time.

She saw his face and, with the clarity of undivided perception, she saw the meaning of the expression on his face: it was the meaning she had fought for hours. She saw it without astonishment, because she had not yet regained her awareness of any reason why it should astonish her.

“This is the way you look,” he said softly, “when you fall asleep in your office,” and she knew that he, too, was not fully aware of letting her hear it: the way he said it told her how often he had thought of it and for what reason. “You look as if you would awaken in a world where you had nothing to hide or to fear,” and she knew that the first movement of her face had been a smile, she knew it in the moment when it vanished, when she grasped that they were both awake. He added quietly, with full awareness, “But here, it’s true.”

Her first emotion of the realm of reality was a sense of power. She sat up with a flowing, leisurely movement of confidence, feeling the flow of the motion from muscle to muscle through her body. She asked, and it was the slowness, the sound of casual curiosity, the tone of taking the implications for granted, that gave to her voice the faintest sound of disdain, “How did you know what I look like in... my office?”

“I told you that I’ve watched you for years.”

“How were you able to watch me that thoroughly? From where?”

“I will not answer you now,” he said, simply, without defiance.

The slight movement of her shoulder leaning back, the pause, then the lower, huskier tone of her voice, left a hint of smiling triumph to trail behind her words: “When did you see me for the first time?”

“Ten years ago,” he answered, looking straight at her, letting her see that he was answering the full, unnamed meaning of her question.

“Where?” The word was almost a command.

He hesitated, then she saw a faint smile that touched only his lips, not his eyes, the kind of smile with which one contemplates—with longing, bitterness and pride—a possession purchased at an excruciating cost; his eyes seemed directed, not at her, but at the girl of that time.

“Underground, in the Taggart Terminal,” he answered.

She became suddenly conscious of her posture: she had let her shoulder blades slide down against the chair, carelessly, half-lying, one leg stretched forward—and with her sternly tailored, transparent blouse, her wide peasant skirt hand-printed in violent colors, her thin stocking and high-heeled pump, she did not look like a railroad executive—the consciousness of it struck her in answer to his eyes that seemed to be seeing the unattainable—she looked like that which she was: his servant girl. She knew the moment when some faintest stress of the brilliance in his dark green eyes removed the veil of distance, replacing the vision of the past by the act of seeing her immediate person.

She met his eyes with that insolent glance which is a smile without movement of facial muscles.

He turned away, but as he moved across the room his steps were as eloquent as the sound of a voice. She knew that he wanted to leave the room, as he always left it, he had never stayed for longer than a brief good night when he came home. She watched the course of his struggle, whether by means of his steps, begun in one direction and swerving in another, or by means of her certainty that her body had become an instrument for the direct perception of his, like a screen reflecting both movements and motives—she could not tell. She knew only that he who had never started or lost a battle against himself, now had no power to leave this room.

His manner seemed to show no sign of strain. He took off his coat, throwing it aside, remaining in shirt sleeves, and sat down, facing her, at the window across the room. But he sat down on the arm of a chair, as if he were neither leaving nor staying.

She felt the light-headed, the easy, the almost frivolous sensation of triumph in the knowledge that she was holding him as surely as by a physical touch; for the length of a moment, brief and dangerous to endure, it was a more satisfying form of contact.

Then she felt a sudden, blinding shock, which was half-blow, half scream within her, and she groped, stunned, for its cause—only to realize that he had leaned a little to one side and it had been no more than the sight of an accidental posture, of the long line running from his shoulder to the angle of his waist, to his hips, down his legs. She looked away, not to let him see that she was trembling—and she dropped all thoughts of triumph and of whose was the power.

“I’ve seen you many times since,” he said, quietly, steadily, but a little more slowly than usual, as if he could control everything except his need to speak.

“Where have you seen me?”

“Many places.”

“But you made certain to remain unseen?” She knew that his was a face she could not have failed to notice.

“Yes.”

“Why? Were you afraid?”

“Yes.”

He said it simply, and it took her a moment to realize that he was admitting he knew what the sight of his person would have meant to her. “Did you know who I was, when you saw me for the first time?”

“Oh yes. My worst enemy but one.”

“What?” She had not expected it; she added, more quietly, “Who’s the worst one?”

“Dr. Robert Stadler.”

“Did you have me classified with him?”

“No. He’s my conscious enemy. He’s the man who sold his soul. We don’t intend to reclaim him. You—you were one of us. I knew it, long before I saw you. I knew also that you would be the last to join us and the hardest one to defeat.”

“Who told you that?”

“Francisco.”

She let a moment pass, then asked, “What did he say?”

“He said that of all the names on our list, you’d be the one most difficult to win. That was when I heard of you for the first time. It was Francisco who put your name on our list. He told me that you were the sole hope and future of Taggart Transcontinental, that you’d stand against us for a long time, that you’d fight a desperate battle for your railroad—because you had too much endurance, courage and consecration to your work.” He glanced at her. “He told me nothing else.

He spoke of you as if he were merely discussing one of our future strikers. I knew that you and he had been childhood friends, that was all.”

“When did you see me?”

“Two years later.”

“How?”

“By chance. It was late at night... on a passenger platform of the Taggart Terminal.” She knew that this was a form of surrender, he did not want to say it, yet he had to speak, she heard both the muted intensity and the pull of resistance in his voice—he had to speak, because he had to give himself and her this one form of contact. “You wore an evening gown. You had a cape half-slipping off your body—I saw, at first, only your bare shoulders, your back and your profile—it looked for a moment as if the cape would slip further and you would stand there naked. Then I saw that you wore a long gown, the color of ice, like the tunic of a Grecian goddess, but had the short hair and the imperious profile of an American woman. You looked preposterously out of place on a railroad platform—and it was not on a railroad platform that I was seeing you, I was seeing a setting that had never haunted me before—but then, suddenly, I knew that you did belong among the rails, the soot and the girders, that that was the proper setting for a flowing gown and naked shoulders and a face as alive as yours—a railroad platform, not a curtained apartment—you looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source—you seemed to bring wealth, grace, extravagance and the enjoyment of life back to their rightful owners, to the men who created railroads and factories—you had a look of energy and of its reward, together, a look of competence and luxury combined—and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable—and I thought that if our age gave form to its proper gods and erected a statue to the meaning of an American railroad, yours would be that statue... Then I saw what you were doing—and I knew who you were. You were giving orders to three Terminal officials, I could not hear your words, but your voice sounded swift, clear-cut and confident. I knew that you were Dagny Taggart. I came closer, close enough to hear two sentences. ‘Who said so?’ asked one of the men. ‘I did,’ you answered. That was all I heard. That was enough.”

“And then?”

He raised his eyes slowly to hold hers across the room, and the submerged intensity that pulled his voice down, blurring its tone to softness, gave it a sound of self-mockery that was desperate and almost gentle: “Then I knew that abandoning my motor was not the hardest price I would have to pay for this strike.”

She wondered which anonymous shadow—among the passengers who had hurried past her, as insubstantial as the steam of the engines and as ignored—which shadow and face had been his; she wondered how close she had come to him for the length of that unknown moment. “Oh, why didn’t you speak to me, then or later?”

“Do you happen to remember what you were doing in the Terminal that night?”

“I remember vaguely a night when they called me from some party I was attending. My father was out of town and the new Terminal manager had made some sort of error that tied up all traffic in the tunnels. The old manager had quit unexpectedly the week before.”

“It was I who made him quit.”

“I see...”

Her voice trailed off, as if abandoning sound, as her eyelids dropped, abandoning sight. If he had not withstood it then—she thought—if he had come to claim her, then or later, what sort of tragedy would they have had to reach?... She remembered what she had felt when she had cried that she would shoot the destroyer on sight...

I would have—the thought was not in words, she knew it only as a trembling pressure in her stomach—I would have shot him, afterward, if I discovered his role... and I would have had to discover it... and yet—she shuddered, because she knew she still wished he had come to her, because the thought not to be admitted into her mind but flowing as a dark warmth through her body, was: I would have shot him, but not before—She raised her eyelids—and she knew that that thought was as naked to him in her eyes, as it was to her in his. She saw his veiled glance and the tautness of his mouth, she saw him reduced to agony, she felt herself drowned by the exultant wish to cause him pain, to see it, to watch it, to watch it beyond her own endurance and his, then to reduce him to the helplessness of pleasure.

He got up, he looked away, and she could not tell whether it was the slight lift of his head or the tension of his features that made his face look oddly calm and clear, as if it were stripped of emotion down to the naked purity of its structure.

“Every man that your railroad needed and lost in the past ten years,” he said, “it was I who made you lose him.” His voice had the single toned flatness and the luminous simplicity of an accountant who reminds a reckless purchaser that cost is an absolute which cannot be escaped, “I have pulled every girder from under Taggart Transcontinental and, if you choose to go back, I will see it collapse upon your head.”

He turned to leave the room. She stopped him. It was her voice, more than her words, that made him stop: her voice was low, it had no quality of emotion, only of a sinking weight, and its sole color was some dragging undertone, like an inner echo, resembling a threat; it was the voice of the plea of a person who still retains a concept of honor, but is long past caring for it: “You want to hold me here, don’t you?”

“More than anything else in the world.”

“You could hold me.”

“I know it.”

His voice had said it with the same sound as hers. He waited, to regain his breath. When he spoke, his voice was low and clear, with some stressed quality of awareness, which was almost the quality of a smile of understanding: “It’s your acceptance of this place that I want. What good would it do me, to have your physical presence without any meaning? That’s the kind of faked reality by which most people cheat themselves of their lives. I’m not capable of it.” He turned to go. “And neither are you. Good night, Miss Taggart.”

He walked out, into his bedroom, closing the door.

She was past the realm of thought—as she lay in bed in the darkness of her room, unable to think or to sleep—and the moaning violence that filled her mind seemed only a sensation of her muscles, but its tone and its twisting shades were like a pleading cry, which she knew, not as words, but as pain: Let him come here, let him break—let it be damned, all of it, my railroad and his strike and everything we’ve lived by!—let it be damned, everything we’ve been and are!—he would, if tomorrow I were to die—then let me die, but tomorrow—let him come here, be it any price he names, I have nothing left that’s not for sale to him any longer—is this what it means to be an animal?—it does and I am... She lay on her back, her palms pressed to the sheet at her sides, to stop herself from rising and walking into his room, knowing that she was capable even of that...

It’s not I, it’s a body I can neither endure nor control... But somewhere within her, not as words, but as a radiant point of stillness, there was the presence of the judge who seemed to observe her, not in stern condemnation any longer, but in approval and amusement, as if saying: Your body?—if he were not what you know him to be, would your body bring you to this?—why is it his body that you want, and no other?—do you think that you are damning them, the things you both have lived by?—are you damning that which you are honoring in this very moment, by your very desire?... She did not have to hear the words, she knew them, she had always known them.

... After a while, she lost the glow of that knowledge, and there was nothing left but pain and the palms that were pressed to the sheet—and the almost indifferent wonder whether he, too, was awake and fighting the same torture.

She heard no sound in the house and saw no light from his window on the tree trunks outside. After a long while she heard, from the darkness of his room, two sounds that gave her a full answer; she knew that he was awake and that he would not come; it was the sound of a step and the click of a cigarette lighter.

Richard Halley stopped playing, turned away from the piano and glanced at Dagny, He saw her drop her face with the involuntary movement of hiding too strong an emotion, he rose, smiled and said softly, “Thank you.”

“Oh no...” she whispered, knowing that the gratitude was hers and that it was futile to express it. She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on a ledge of the valley, when all this prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty—while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modern symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence.

“But I mean it,” said Richard Halley, smiling. “I’m a businessman and I never do anything without payment. You’ve paid me. Do you see why I wanted to play for you tonight?”

She raised her head. He stood in the middle of his living room, they were alone, with the window open to the summer night, to the dark trees on a long sweep of ledges descending toward the glitter of the valley’s distant lights.

“Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?”

“Not many,” she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery, but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.

“That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don’t mean your enjoyment, I don’t mean your emotion—emotions be damned!—I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it—I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired.” He chuckled.

“There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it’s a fear I’ve never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek—I value both too highly.

I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or blindly, I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s heart—only by someone’s head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she said incredulously, “I do,” incredulously because she was hearing her own symbol of moral pride, chosen by a man she had least expected to choose it.

“If you do, why did you look quite so tragic just a moment ago?

What is it that you regret?”

“The years when your work has remained unheard.”

“But it hasn’t. I’ve given two or three concerts every year. Here, in Galt’s Gulch. I am giving one next week. I hope you’ll come. The price of admission is twenty-five cents.”

She could not help laughing. He smiled, then his face slipped slowly into earnestness, as under the tide of some unspoken contemplation of his own. He looked at the darkness beyond the window, at a spot where, in a clearing of the branches, with the moonlight draining its color, leaving only its metallic luster, the sign of the dollar hung like a curve of shining steel engraved on the sky.

“Miss Taggart, do you see why I’d give three dozen modern artists for one real businessman? Why I have much more in common with Ellis Wyatt or Ken Danagger—who happens to be tone deaf—than with men like Mort Liddy and Balph Eubank? Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes—which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification—which means: the capacity to sew, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels—what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discover how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor? That sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets—what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of his new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through all the ages?... An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth, Miss Taggart? Have you heard the moralists and the art lovers of the centuries talk about the artist’s intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth? Name me a greater example of such devotion than the act of a man who says that the earth does turn, or the act of a man who says that an alloy of steel and copper has certain properties which enable it to do certain things, that it is and does—and let the world rack him or ruin him, he will not bear false witness to the evidence of his mind! This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth—as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he’s an artist who hasn’t the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he’s not restrained by such crude concepts as ‘being’ or ‘meaning’ he’s the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn’t know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn’t stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is feel—he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one’s power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art—I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest and a severity no army drilling sadist could impose—I’ll take the operator of a coal mine over any walking vehicle of higher mysteries. The operator knows that it’s not his feelings that keep the coal carts moving under the earth—and he knows what does keep them moving. Feelings? Oh yes, we do feel, he, you and I—we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling—and we know where our feelings come from. But what we did not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those who claim that they cannot account for their feelings. We did not know what it is that they feel. We are learning it now. It was a costly error. And those most guilty of it, will pay the hardest price—as, in justice, they must. Those most guilty of it were the real artists, who will now see that they are first to be exterminated and that they had prepared the triumph of their own exterminators by helping to destroy their only protectors. For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn’t know that he’s an exponent of man’s highest creative spirit—it’s the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy.”

It was true—she thought, when she walked through the streets of the valley, looking with a child’s excitement at the shop windows sparkling in the sun—that the businesses here had the purposeful selectiveness of art—and that the art—she thought, when she sat in the darkness of a clapboard concert hall, listening to the controlled violence and the mathematical precision of Halley’s music—had the stern discipline of business.

Both had the radiance of engineering—she thought, when she sat among rows of benches under the open sky, watching Kay Ludlow on the stage. It was an experience she had not known since childhood—the experience of being held for three hours by a play that told a story she had not seen before, in lines she had not heard, uttering a theme that had not been picked from the hand-me-downs of the centuries. It was the forgotten delight of being held in rapt attention by the reins of the ingenious, the unexpected, the logical, the purposeful, the new—and of seeing it embodied in a performance of superlative artistry by a woman playing a character whose beauty of spirit matched her own physical perfection.

“That’s why I’m here, Miss Taggart,” said Kay Ludlow, smiling in answer to her comment, after the performance. “Whatever quality of human greatness I have the talent to portray—that was the quality the outer world sought to degrade. They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity. They used my talent—for the defamation of itself. That was why I quit.”

Not since childhood, thought Dagny, had she felt that sense of exhilaration after witnessing the performance of a play—the sense that life held things worth reaching, not the sense of having studied some aspect of a sewer there had been no reason to see. As the audience filed away into the darkness from the lighted rows of benches, she noticed Ellis Wyatt, Judge Narragansett, Ken Danagger, men who had once been said to despise all forms of art.

The last image she caught, that evening, was the sight of two tall, straight, slender figures walking away together down a trail among the rocks, with the beam of a spotlight flashing once on the gold of their hair. They were Kay Ludlow and Ragnar Danneskjold—and she wondered whether she could bear to return to a world where these were the two doomed to destruction.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

“They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart,” said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. “They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you’ve met my husband, he’s the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker’s oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband’s profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”

She thought of the teachers whom the schools of the world had lost—when she looked at the three pupils of Dr. Akston, on the evening of their yearly reunion.

The only other guest he had invited was Kay Ludlow. The six of them sat in the back yard of his house, with the light of the sunset on their faces, and the floor of the valley condensing into a soft blue vapor far below.

She looked at his pupils, at the three pliant, agile figures half stretched on canvas chairs in poses of relaxed contentment, dressed in slacks, windbreakers and open-collared shirts: John Galt, Francisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold.

“Don’t be astonished, Miss Taggart,” said Dr. Akston, smiling, “and don’t make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They’re something much greater and more astounding than that: they’re normal men—a thing the world has never seen—and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world’s doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.”

She felt some new quality in Dr. Akston’s attitude, some change in the sternness of his usual reserve; he seemed to include her in their circle, as if she were more than a guest. Francisco acted as if her presence at their reunion were natural and to be taken gaily for granted. Galt’s face gave no hint of any reaction; his manner was that of a courteous escort who had brought her here at Dr. Akston’s request.

She noticed that Dr. Akston’s eyes kept coming back to her, as if with the quiet pride of displaying his students to an appreciative observer. His conversation kept returning to a single theme, in the manner of a father who has found a listener interested in his most cherished subject: “You should have seen them, when they were in college, Miss Taggart. You couldn’t have found three boys ‘conditioned’ to such different backgrounds, but—conditioners be damned!—they must have picked one another at first sight, among the thousands on that campus.

Francisco, the richest man in the world—Ragnar, the European aristocrat—and John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less. Actually, he was the son of a gas-station mechanic at some forsaken crossroads in Ohio, and he had left home at the age of twelve to make his own way—but I’ve always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter’s head, fully grown and fully armed... I remember the day when I saw the three of them for the first time. They were sitting at the back of the classroom—I was giving a special course for postgraduate students, so difficult a course that few outsiders ever ventured to attend these particular lectures. Those three looked too young even for freshmen—they were sixteen at the time, as I learned later. At the end of that lecture, John got up to ask me a question. It was a question which, as a teacher, I would have been proud to hear from a student who’d taken six years of philosophy. It was a question pertaining to Plato’s metaphysics, which Plato hadn’t had the sense to ask of himself. I answered—and I asked John to come to my office after the lecture.

He came—all three of them came—I saw the two others in my anteroom and let them in. I talked to them for an hour—then I cancelled all my appointments and talked to them for the rest of the day. After which, I arranged to let them take that course and receive their credits for it. They took the course. They got the highest grades in the class.

... They were majoring in two subjects: physics and philosophy.

Their choice amazed everybody but me: modern thinkers considered it unnecessary to perceive reality, and modern physicists considered it unnecessary to think. I knew better; what amazed me was that these children knew it, too... Robert Stadler was head of the Department of Physics, as I was head of the Department of Philosophy. He and I suspended all rules and restrictions for these three students, we spared them all the routine, unessential courses, we loaded them with nothing but the hardest tasks, and we cleared their way to major in our two subjects within their four years. They worked for it. And, during those four years, they worked for their living, besides. Francisco and Ragnar were receiving allowances from their parents, John had nothing, but all three of them held part-time jobs to earn their own experience and money. Francisco worked in a copper foundry, John worked in a railroad roundhouse, and Ragnar—no, Miss Taggart, Ragnar was not the least, but the most studiously sedate of the three—he worked as clerk in the university library. They had time for everything they wanted, but no time for people or for any communal campus activities. They... Ragnar!” he interrupted himself suddenly, sharply. “Don’t sit on the ground!”

Danneskjold had slipped down and was now sitting on the grass, with his head leaning against Kay Ludlow’s knees. He rose obediently, chuckling. Dr. Akston smiled with a touch of apology.

“It’s an old habit of mine,” he explained to Dagny. “A ‘conditioned’ reflex, I guess. I used to tell him that in those college years, when I’d catch him sitting on the ground in my back yard, on cold, foggy evenings—he was reckless that way, he made me worry, he should have known it was dangerous and—”

He stopped abruptly; he read in Dagny’s startled eyes the same thought as his own: the thought of the kind of dangers the adult Ragnar had chosen to face. Dr. Akston shrugged, spreading his hands in a gesture of helpless self-mockery. Kay Ludlow smiled at him in understanding.

“My house stood just outside the campus,” he continued, sighing, “on a tall bluff over Lake Erie. We spent many evenings together, the four of us. We would sit just like this, in my back yard, on the nights of early fall or in the spring, only instead of this granite mountainside, we had the spread of the lake before us, stretching off into a peacefully unlimited distance. I had to work harder on those nights than in any classroom, answering all the questions they’d ask me, discussing the kind of issues they’d raise. About midnight, I would fix some hot chocolate and force them to drink it—the one thing I suspected was that they never took time to eat properly—and then we’d go on talking, while the lake vanished into solid darkness and the sky seemed lighter than the earth. There were a few times when we stayed there till I noticed suddenly that the sky was turning darker and the lake was growing pale and we were within a few sentences of daylight. I should have known better, I knew that they weren’t getting enough sleep as it was, but I forgot it occasionally, I lost my sense of time—you see, when they were there, I always felt as if it were early morning and a long, inexhaustible day were stretching ahead before us. They never spoke of what they wished they might do in the future, they never wondered whether some mysterious omnipotence had favored them with some unknowable talent to achieve the things they wanted—they spoke of what they would do. Does affection tend to make one a coward? I know that the only times I felt fear were occasional moments when I listened to them and thought of what the world was becoming and what they would have to encounter in the future. Fear?

Yes—but it was more than fear. It was the kind of emotion that makes men capable of killing—when I thought that the purpose of the world’s trend was to destroy these children, that these three sons of mine were marked for immolation. Oh yes, I would have killed—but whom was there to kill? It was everyone and no one, there was no single enemy, no center and no villain, it was not the simpering social worker incapable of earning a penny or the thieving bureaucrat scared of his own shadow, it was the whole of the earth rolling into an obscenity of horror, pushed by the hand of every would-be decent man who believed that need is holier than ability, and pity is holier than justice. But these were only occasional moments. It was not my constant feeling. I listened to my children and I knew that nothing would defeat them. I looked at them, as they sat in my back yard, and beyond my house there were the tall, dark buildings of what was still a monument to unenslaved thought—the Patrick Henry University—and farther in the distance there were the lights of Cleveland, the orange glow of steel mills behind batteries of smokestacks, the twinkling red dots of radio towers, the long white rays of airports on the black edge of the sky—and I thought that in the name of any greatness that had ever existed and moved this world, the greatness of which they were the last descendants, they would win... I remember one night when I noticed that John had been silent for a long time—and I saw that he had fallen asleep, stretched there on the ground.

The two others confessed that he had not slept for three days. I sent the two of them home at once, but I didn’t have the heart to disturb him. It was a warm spring night, I brought a blanket to cover him, and I let him sleep where he was. I sat there beside him till morning—and as I watched his face in the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled forehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer, I do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a misguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would win and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved.” He moved his arm, pointing to the valley. “I did not expect it to be as great as this—or as hard.”

It had grown dark and the mountains had blended with the sky.

Hanging detached in space, there were the lights of the valley below them, the red breath of Stockton’s foundry above, and the lighted string of windows of Mulligan’s house, like a railroad car imbedded in the sky.

“I did have a rival,” said Dr. Akston slowly. “It was Robert Stadler... Don’t frown, John—it’s past... John did love him, once.

Well, so did I—no, not quite, but what one felt for a mind like Stadler’s was painfully close to love, it was that rarest of pleasures: admiration. No, I did not love him, but he and I had always felt as if we were fellow survivors from some vanishing age or land, in the gibbering swamp of mediocrity around us. The mortal sin of Robert Stadler was that he never identified his proper homeland... He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people—a biting, bitter, weary hatred for any ineptitude that dared to oppose him. He wanted his own way, he wanted to be left alone to pursue it, he wanted to brush people out of his path—and he never identified the means to it or the nature of his path and of his enemies. He took a short cut. Are you smiling, Miss Taggart?

You hate him, don’t you? Yes, you know the kind of short cut he took... He told you that we were rivals for these three students.

That was true—or rather, that was not the way I thought of it, but I knew that he did. Well, if we were rivals, I had one advantage: I knew why they needed both our professions; he never understood their interest in mine. He never understood its importance to himself—which, incidentally, is what destroyed him. But in those years he was still alive enough to grasp at these three students. ‘Grasp’ was the word for it. Intelligence being the only value he worshipped, he clutched them as if they were a private treasure of his own. He had always been a very lonely man. I think that in the whole of his life, Francisco and Ragnar were his only love, and John was his only passion. It was John whom he regarded as his particular heir, as his future, as his own immortality. John intended to be an inventor, which meant that he was to be a physicist; he was to take his postgraduate course under Robert Stadler. Francisco intended to leave after graduation and go to work; he was to be the perfect blend of both of us, his two intellectual fathers: an industrialist. And Ragnar—you didn’t know what profession Ragnar had chosen, Miss Taggart? No, it wasn’t stunt pilot, or jungle explorer, or deep-sea diver. It was something much more courageous than these. Ragnar intended to be a philosopher. An abstract, theoretical, academic, cloistered, ivory-tower philosopher...

Yes, Robert Stadler loved them. And yet—I have said that I would have killed to protect them, only there was no one to kill. If that were the solution—which, of course, it isn’t—the man to kill was Robert Stadler. Of any one person, of any single guilt for the evil which is now destroying the world—his was the heaviest guilt. He had the mind to know better. His was the only name of honor and achievement, used to sanction the rule of the looters. He was the man who delivered science into the power of the looters’ guns. John did not expect it. Neither did I... John came back for his postgraduate course in physics. But he did not finish it. He left, on the day when Robert Stadler endorsed the establishment of a State Science Institute.

I met Stadler by chance in a corridor of the university, as he came out of his office after his last conversation with John. He looked changed.

I hope that I shall never have to see again a change of that kind in a man’s face. He saw me approaching—and he did not know, but I knew, what made him whirl upon me and cry, ‘I’m so sick of all of you Impractical idealists!’ I turned away. I knew that I had heard a man pronounce a death sentence upon himself... Miss Taggart, do you remember the question you asked me about my three pupils?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“I could gather, from your question, the nature of what Robert Stadler had said to you about them. Tell me, why did he speak of them at all?”

He saw the faint movement of her bitter smile. “He told me their story as a justification for his belief in the futility of human intelligence. He told it to me as an example of his disillusioned hope. ‘Theirs was the kind of ability,’ he said, ‘one expects to see, in the future, changing the course of the world’.”

“Well, haven’t they done so?”

She nodded, slowly, holding her head inclined for a long moment in acquiescence and in homage.

“What I want you to understand, Miss Taggart, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check—before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity—whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires. Robert Stadler now believes that intelligence is futile and that human life can be nothing but irrational. Did he expect John Galt to become a great scientist, willing to work under the orders of Dr. Floyd Ferris? Did he expect Francisco d’Anconia to become a great industrialist, willing to produce under the orders and for the benefit of Wesley Mouch? Did he expect Ragnar Danneskjold to become a great philosopher, willing to preach, under the orders of Dr. Simon Pritchett, that there is no mind and that might is right? Would that have been a future which Robert Stadler would have considered rational? I want you to observe, Miss Taggart, that those who cry the loudest about their disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility of reason, the impotence of logic—are those who have achieved the full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so mercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst—in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies. In such a world John Galt, the man of incalculable intellectual power, will remain an unskilled laborer—Francisco d’Anconia, the miraculous producer of wealth, will become a wastrel—and Ragnar Danneskjold, the man of enlightenment, will become the man of violence. Society—and Dr. Robert Stadler—have achieved everything they advocated. What complaint do they now have to make? That the universe is irrational? Is it?”

He smiled; his smile had the pitiless gentleness of certainty.

“Every man builds his world in his own image,” he said. “He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice. Whoever preserves a single thought uncorrupted by any concession to the will of others, whoever brings into reality a matchstick or a patch of garden made in the image of his thought—he, and to that extent, is a man, and that extent is the sole measure of his virtue. They”—he pointed at his pupils—“made no concessions. This”—he pointed at the valley—“is the measure of what they preserved and of what they are... Now I can repeat my answer to the question you asked me, knowing that you will understand it fully. You asked me whether I was proud of the way my three sons had turned out. I am more proud than I had ever hoped to be. I am proud of their every action, of their every goal—and of every value they’ve chosen. And this, Dagny, is my full answer.”

The sudden sound of her first name was pronounced in the tone of a father; he spoke his last two sentences, looking, not at her, but at Galt.

She saw Galt answering him by an open glance held steady for an instant, like a signal of affirmation. Then Galt’s eyes moved to hers.

She saw him looking at her as if she bore the unspoken title that hung in the silence between them, the title Dr. Akston had granted her, but had not pronounced and none of the others had caught—she saw, in Galt’s eyes, a glance of amusement at her shock, of support and, incredibly, of tenderness.

D’Anconia Copper No. 1 was a small cut on the face of the mountain, that looked as if a knife had made a few angular slashes, leaving shelves of rock, red as a wound, on the reddish-brown flank.

The sun beat down upon it. Dagny stood at the edge of a path, holding on to Galt’s arm on one side and to Francisco’s on the other, the wind blowing against their faces and out over the valley, two thousand feet below.

This—she thought, looking at the mine—was the story of human wealth written across the mountains: a few pine trees hung over the cut, contorted by the storms that had raged through the wilderness for centuries, six men worked on the shelves, and an inordinate amount of complex machinery traced delicate lines against the sky; the machinery did most of the work.

She noticed that Francisco was displaying his domain to Galt as much as to her, as much or more. “You haven’t seen it since last year, John... John, wait till you see it a year from now. I’ll be through, outside, in just a few months—and then this will be my full-time job.”

“Hell, no, John!” he said, laughing, in answer to a question—but she caught suddenly the particular quality of his glance whenever it rested on Galt: it was the quality she had seen in his eyes when he had stood in her room, clutching the edge of a table to outlive an unlivable moment; he had looked as if he were seeing someone before him; it was Galt, she thought; it was Galt’s image that had carried him through.

Some part of her felt a dim dread: the effort which Francisco had made in that moment to accept her loss and his rival, as the payment demanded of him for his battle, had cost him so much that he was now unable to suspect the truth Dr. Akston had guessed. What will it do to him when he learns?—she wondered, and felt a bitter voice reminding her that there would, perhaps, never be any truth of this kind to learn.

Some part of her felt a dim tension as she watched the way Galt looked at Francisco: it was an open, simple, unreserved glance of surrender to an unreserved feeling. She felt the anxious wonder she had never fully named or dismissed: wonder whether this feeling would bring him down to the ugliness of renunciation.

But most of her mind seemed swept by some enormous sense of release, as if she were laughing at all doubts. Her glance kept going back over the path they had traveled to get here, over the two exhausting miles of a twisted trail that ran, like a precarious corkscrew, from the tip of her feet down to the floor of the valley. Her eyes kept studying it, her mind racing with some purpose of its own.

Brush, pines and a clinging carpet of moss went climbing from the green slopes far below, up the granite ledges. The moss and the brush vanished gradually, but the pines went on, struggling upward in thinning strands, till only a few dots of single trees were left, rising up the naked rock toward the white sunbursts of snow in the crevices at the peaks. She looked at the spectacle of the most ingenious mining machinery she had ever seen, then at the trail where the plodding hoofs and swaying shapes of mules provided the most ancient form of transportation.

“Francisco,” she asked, pointing, “who designed the machines?”

“They’re just adaptations of standard equipment.”

“Who designed them?”

“I did. We don’t have many men to spare. We had to make up for it.”

“You’re wasting an unconscionable amount of manpower and time, carting your ore on muleback. You ought to build a railroad down to the valley.”

She was looking down and did not notice the sudden, eager shot of his glance to her face or the sound of caution in his voice: “I know it, but it’s such a difficult job that the mine’s output won’t justify it at present.”

“Nonsense! It’s much simpler than it looks. There’s a pass to the east where there’s an easier grade and softer stone, I watched it on the way up, it wouldn’t take so many curves, three miles of rail or less would do it.”

She was pointing east, she did not notice the intensity with which the two men were watching her face.

“Just a narrow-gauge track is all you’ll need... like the first railroads... that’s where the first railroads started—at mines, only they were coal mines... Look, do you see that ridge? There’s plenty of clearance for a three-foot gauge, you wouldn’t need to do any blasting or widening. Do you see where there’s a slow rise for a stretch of almost half a mile? That would be no worse than a four per cent grade, any engine could manage it.” She was speaking with a swift, bright certainty, conscious of nothing but the joy of performing her natural function in her natural world where nothing could take precedence over the act of offering a solution to a problem. “The road will pay for itself within three years. I think, at a rough glance, that the costliest part of the job will be a couple of steel trestles—and there’s one spot where I might have to blast a tunnel, but it’s only for a hundred feet or less. I’ll need a steel trestle to throw the track across that gorge and bring it here, but it’s not as hard as it looks—let me show you, have you got a piece of paper?”

She did not notice with what speed Galt produced a notebook and a pencil and thrust them into her hands—she seized them, as if she expected them to be there, as if she were giving orders on a construction site where details of this kind were not to delay her.

“Let me give you a rough idea of what I mean. If we drive diagonal piles into the rock”—she was sketching rapidly—“the actual steel span would be only six hundred feet long—it would cut off this last half mile of your corkscrew turns—I could have the rail laid in three months and—”

She stopped. When she looked up at their faces, the fire had gone out of hers. She crumpled her sketch and flung it aside into the red dust of the gravel. “Oh, what for?” she cried, the despair breaking out for the first time. “To build three miles of railroad and abandon a transcontinental system!”

The two men were looking at her, she saw no reproach in their faces, only a look of understanding which was almost compassion.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, dropping her eyes.

“If you change your mind,” said Francisco, “I’ll hire you on the spot—or Midas will give you a loan in five minutes to finance that railroad, if you want to own it yourself.”

She shook her head. “I can’t...” she whispered, “not yet...”

She raised her eyes, knowing that they knew the nature of her despair and that it was useless to hide her struggle. “I’ve tried it once,” she said. “I’ve tried to give it up... I know what it will mean...

I’ll think of it with every crosstie I’ll see laid here, with every spike driven... I’ll think of that other tunnel and... and of Nat Taggart’s bridge... Oh, if only I didn’t have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they’re doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!”

“You’ll have to hear about it,” said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. “You’ll hear the whole course of the last agony of Taggart Transcontinental.

You’ll hear about every wreck. You’ll hear about every discontinued train. You’ll hear about every abandoned line. You’ll hear about the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”

She looked at him, her head lifted, knowing what chance he was rejecting. She thought that no man of the outer world would have said this to her at this moment—she thought of the world’s code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy—she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time—she felt an enormous pride for the tight, clean face of the man before her—he saw the shape of her mouth drawn firm in self-control, yet softened by some tremulous emotion, while she answered quietly, “Thank you. You’re right.”

“You don’t have to answer me now,” he said. “You’ll tell me when you’ve decided. There’s still a week left.”

“Yes,” she said calmly, “just one more week.”

He turned, picked up her crumpled sketch, folded it neatly and slipped it into his pocket.

“Dagny,” said Francisco, “when you weigh your decision, consider the first time you quit, if you wish, but consider everything about it.

In this valley, you won’t have to torture yourself by shingling roofs and building paths that lead nowhere.”

“Tell me,” she asked suddenly, “how did you find out where I was, that time?”

He smiled. “It was John who told me. The destroyer, remember?

You wondered why the destroyer had not sent anyone after you. But he had. It was he who sent me there.”

“He sent you?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Nothing much. Why?”

“What did he say? Do you remember the exact words?”

“Yes, I do remember. He said, ‘If you want your chance, take it. You’ve earned it.’ I remember, because—” He turned to Galt with the untroubled frown of a slight, casual puzzle. “John, I never quite understood why you said it. Why that? Why—my chance?”

“Do you mind if I don’t answer you now?”

“No, but—”

Someone hailed him from the ledges of the mine, and he went off swiftly, as if the subject required no further attention.

She was conscious of the long span of moments she took while turning her head to Galt. She knew that she would find him looking at her. She could read nothing in his eyes, except a hint of derision, as if he knew what answer she was seeking and that she would not find it in his face.

“You gave him a chance that you wanted?”

“I could have no chance till he’d had every chance possible to him.”

“How did you know what he had earned?”

“I had been questioning him about you for ten years, every time I could, in every way, from every angle. No, he did not tell me—it was the way he spoke of you that did. He didn’t want to speak, but he spoke too eagerly, eagerly and reluctantly together—and then I knew that it had not been just a childhood friendship. I knew how much he had given up for the strike and how desperately he hadn’t given it up forever. I? I was merely questioning him about one of our most important future strikers—as I questioned him about many others.”

The hint of derision remained in his eyes; he knew that she had wanted to hear this, but that this was not the answer to the one question she feared.

She looked from his face to Francisco’s approaching figure, not hiding from herself any longer that her sudden, heavy, desolate anxiety was the fear that Galt might throw the three of them into the hopeless waste of self-sacrifice.

Francisco approached, looking at her thoughtfully, as if weighing some question of his own, but some question that gave a sparkle of reckless gaiety to his eyes.

“Dagny, there’s only one week left,” he said. “If you decide to go back, it will be the last, for a long time.” There was no reproach and no sadness in his voice, only some softened quality as sole evidence of emotion. “If you leave now—oh yes, you’ll still come back—but it won’t be soon. And I—in a few months, I’ll come to live here permanently, so if you go, I won’t see you again, perhaps for years.

I’d like you to spend this last week with me. I’d like you to move to my house. As my guest, nothing else, for no reason, except that I’d like you to.”

He said it simply, as if nothing were or could be hidden among the three of them. She saw no sign of astonishment in Galt’s face. She felt some swift tightening in her chest, something hard, reckless and almost vicious that had the quality of a dark excitement driving her blindly into action.

“But I’m an employee,” she said, with an odd smile, looking at Galt, “I have a job to finish.”

“I won’t hold you to it,” said Galt, and she felt anger at the tone of his voice, a tone that granted her no hidden significance and answered nothing but the literal meaning of her words. “You can quit the job any time you wish. It’s up to you.”

“No, it isn’t. I’m a prisoner here. Don’t you remember? I’m to take orders. I have no preferences to follow, no wishes to express, no decisions to make. I want the decision to be yours.”

“You want it to be mine?”

“Yes!”

“You’ve expressed a wish.”

The mockery of his voice was in its seriousness—and she threw at him defiantly, not smiling, as if daring him to continue pretending that he did not understand: “All right. That’s what I wish!”

He smiled, as at a child’s complex scheming which he had long since seen through. “Very well.” But he did not smile, as he said, turning to Francisco, “Then—no.”

The defiance toward an adversary who was the sternest of teachers, was all that Francisco had read in her face. He shrugged, regretfully, but gaily. “You’re probably right. If you can’t prevent her from going back—nobody can.”

She was not hearing Francisco’s words. She was stunned by the magnitude of the relief that hit her at the sound of Galt’s answer, a relief that told her the magnitude of the fear it swept away. She knew, only after it was over, what had hung for her on his decision; she knew that had his answer been different, it would have destroyed the valley in her eyes.

She wanted to laugh, she wanted to embrace them both and laugh with them in celebration, it did not seem to matter whether she would stay here or return to the world, a week was like an endless span of time, either course seemed flooded by an unchanging sunlight—and no struggle was hard, she thought, if this was the nature of existence. The relief did not come from the knowledge that he would not renounce her, nor from arty assurance that she would win—the relief came from the certainty that he would always remain what he was.

“I don’t know whether I’ll go back to the world or not,” she said soberly, but her voice was trembling with a subdued violence, which was pure gaiety. “I’m sorry that I’m still unable to make a decision.

I’m certain of only one thing: that I won’t be afraid to decide.”

Francisco took the sudden brightness of her face as proof that the incident had been of no significance. But Galt understood; he glanced at her and the glance was part amusement, part contemptuous reproach.

He said nothing, until they were alone, walking down the trail to the valley. Then he glanced at her again, the amusement sharper in his eyes, and said, “You had to put me to a test in order to learn whether I’d fall to the lowest possible stage of altruism?”

She did not answer, but looked at him in open, undefensive admission.

He chuckled and looked away, and a few steps later said slowly, in the tone of a quotation, “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”

Part of the intensity of her relief—she thought, as she walked silently by his side—was the shock of a contrast: she had seen, with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled—she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galt’s self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth—Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, half-charity-patient, half-crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man—the three of them, who had had all the gifts of existence spread out before them, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration—the frustration of not being able to make unreality real.

But this—she thought—was men’s moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another’s weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born. Here—she thought, looking down through green branches at the glittering roofs of the valley—one dealt with men as clear and firm as sun and rocks, and the immense light-heartedness of her relief came from the knowledge that no battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

“Did it ever occur to you, Miss Taggart,” said Galt, in the casual tone of an abstract discussion, but as if he had known her thoughts, “that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires—if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another—if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn’t. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer’s wealth, the artist who envies a rival’s higher talent—they’re all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame—they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy—so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients.”

He glanced at her and added slowly, a slight emphasis as sole change in the impersonal tone of his voice, “No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy. You should have had more respect for him and for me than to fear what you had feared.”

She did not answer, she felt as if a word would overfill the fullness of this moment, she merely turned to him with a look of acquiescence that was disarmed, childishly humble and would have been an apology but for its shining joy. He smiled—in amusement, in understanding, almost in comradeship of the things they shared and in sanction of the things she felt.

They went on in silence, and it seemed to her that this was a summer day out of a carefree youth she had never lived, it was just a walk through the country by two people who were free for the pleasure of motion and sunlight, with no unsolved burdens left to carry. Her sense of lightness blended with the weightless sense of walking downhill, as if she needed no effort to walk, only to restrain herself from flying, and she walked, fighting the speed of the downward pull, her body leaning back, the wind blowing her skirt like a sail to brake her motion.

They parted at the bottom of the trail; he went to keep an appointment with Midas Mulligan, while she went to Hammond’s Market with a list of items for the evening’s dinner as the sole concern of her world.

His wife—she thought, letting herself hear consciously the word Dr. Akston had not pronounced, the word she had long since felt, but never named—for three weeks she had been his wife in every sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned, but this much was real and today she could permit herself to know it, to feel it, to live with that one thought for this one day.

The groceries, which Lawrence Hammond was lining up at her order on the polished counter of his store, had never appeared to her as such shining objects—and, intent upon them, she was only half-conscious of some disturbing element, of something that was wrong but that her mind was too full to notice. She noticed it only when she saw Hammond pause, frown and stare upward, at the sky beyond his open store front.

In time with his words: “I think somebody’s trying to repeat your stunt, Miss Taggart,” she realized that it was the sound of an airplane overhead and that it had been there for some time, a sound which was not to be heard in the valley after the first of this month.

They rushed out to the street. The small silver cross of a plane was circling above the ring of mountains, like a sparkling dragonfly about to brush the peaks with its wings.

“What does he think he’s doing?” said Lawrence Hammond.

There were people at the doors of the shops and standing still all down the street, looking up.

“Is... is anyone expected?” she asked and was astonished by the anxiety of her own voice.

“No,” said Hammond. “Everyone who’s got any business here is here.” He did not sound disturbed, but grimly curious.

The plane was now a small dash, like a silver cigarette, streaking against the flanks of the mountains: it had dropped lower.

“Looks like a private monoplane,” said Hammond, squinting against the sun. “Not an army model.”

“Will the ray screen hold out?” she asked tensely, in a tone of defensive resentment against the approach of an enemy.

He chuckled. “Hold out?”

“Will he see us?”

“That screen is safer than an underground vault, Miss Taggart. As you ought to know.”

The plane rose, and for a moment it was only a bright speck, like a bit of paper blown by the wind—it hovered uncertainly, then dropped down again into another circling spiral.

“What in hell is he after?” said Hammond.

Her eyes shot suddenly to his face.

“He’s looking for something,” said Hammond. “What?”

“Is there a telescope somewhere?”

“Why—yes, at the airfield, but—” He was about to ask what was the matter with her voice—but she was running across the road, down the path to the airfield, not knowing that she was running, driven by a reason she had no time and no courage to name.

She found Dwight Sanders at the small telescope of the control tower; he was watching the plane attentively, with a puzzled frown.

“Let me see it!” she snapped.

She clutched the metal tube, she pressed her eye to the lens, her hand guiding the tube slowly to follow the plane—then he saw that her hand had stopped, but her fingers did not open and her face remained bent over the telescope, pressed to the lens, until he looked closer and saw that the lens was pressed to her forehead.

“What’s the matter, Miss Taggart?”

She raised her head slowly.

“Is it anyone you know, Miss Taggart?”

She did not answer. She hurried away, her steps rushing with the zigzagging aimlessness of uncertainty—she dared not run, but she had to escape, she had to hide, she did not know whether she was afraid to be seen by the men around her or by the plane above—the plane whose silver wings bore the number that belonged to Hank Rearden.

She stopped when she stumbled over a rock and fell and noticed that she had been running. She was on a small ledge in the cliffs above the airfield, hidden from the sight of the town, open to the view of the sky. She rose, her hands groping for support along a granite wall, feeling the warmth of the sun on the rock under her palms—she stood, her back pressed to the wall, unable to move or to take her eyes off the plane.

The plane was circling slowly, dipping down, then rising again, struggling—she thought—as she had struggled, to distinguish the sight of a wreck in a hopeless spread of crevices and boulders, an elusive spread neither clear enough to abandon nor to survey. He was searching for the wreck of her plane, he had not given up, and whatever the three weeks of it had cost him, whatever he felt, the only evidence he would give to the world and his only answer was this steady, insistent, monotonous drone of a motor carrying a fragile craft over every deadly foot of an inaccessible chain of mountains.

Through the brilliant purity of the summer air, the plane seemed intimately close, she could see it rock on precarious currents and bank under the thrusts of wind. She could see, and it seemed impossible that so clear a sight was closed to his eyes. The whole of the valley lay below him, flooded by sunlight, flaming with glass panes and green lawns, screaming to be seen—the end of his tortured quest, the fulfillment of more than his wishes, not the wreck of her plane and her body, but her living presence and his freedom—all that he was seeking or had ever sought was now spread open before him, open and waiting, his to be reached by a straight-line dive through the pure, clear air—his and asking nothing of him but the capacity to see. “Hank!” she screamed, waving her arms in desperate signal. “Hank!”

She fell back against the rock, knowing that she had no way to reach him, that she had no power to give him sight, that no power on earth could pierce that screen except his own mind and vision.

Suddenly and for the first time, she felt the screen, not as the most intangible, but as the most grimly absolute barrier in the world.

Slumped against the rock, she watched, in silent resignation, the hopeless circles of the plane’s struggle and its motor’s uncomplaining cry for help, a cry she had no way to answer. The plane swooped down abruptly, but it was only the start of its final rise, it cut a swift diagonal across the mountains and shot into the open sky. Then, as if caught in the spread of a lake with no shores and no exit, it went sinking slowly and drowning out of sight.

She thought, in bitter compassion, of how much he had failed to see.

And I?—she thought. If she left the valley, the screen would close for her as tightly, Atlantis would descend under a vault of rays more impregnable than the bottom of the ocean, and she, too, would be left to struggle for the things she had not known how to see, she, too, would be left to fight a mirage of primordial savagery, while the reality of all that she desired would never come again within her reach, But the pull of the outer world, the pull that drew her to follow the plane, was not the image of Hank Rearden—she knew that she could not return to him, even if she returned to the world—the pull was the vision of Hank Rearden’s courage and the courage of all those still fighting to stay alive. He would not give up the search for her plane, when all others had long since despaired, as he would not give up his mills, as he would not give up any goal he had chosen if a single chance was left. Was she certain that no chance remained for the world of Taggart Transcontinental? Was she certain that the terms of the battle were such that she could not care to win? They were right, the men of Atlantis, they were right to vanish if they knew that they left no value behind them—but until and unless she saw that no chance was untaken and no battle unfought, she had no right to remain among them. This was the question that had lashed her for weeks, but had not driven her to a glimpse of the answer.

She lay awake, through the hours of that night, quietly motionless, following—like an engineer and like Hank Rearden—a process of dispassionate, precise, almost mathematical consideration, with no regard for cost or feeling. The agony which he lived in his plane, she lived it in a soundless cube of darkness, searching, but finding no answer. She looked at the inscriptions on the walls of her room, faintly visible in patches of starlight, but the help those men had called in their darkest hour was not hers to call.

“Yes or no, Miss Taggart?”

She looked at the faces of the four men in the soft twilight of Mulligan’s living room: Galt, whose face had the serene, impersonal attentiveness of a scientist—Francisco, whose face was made expressionless by the hint of a smile, the kind of smile that would fit either answer—Hugh Akston who looked compassionately gentle—Midas Mulligan, who had asked the question with no touch of rancor in his voice. Somewhere two thousand miles away, at this sunset hour, the page of a calendar was springing into light over the roofs of New York, saying: June 28—and it seemed to her suddenly that she was seeing it, as if it were hanging over the heads of these men.

“I have one more day,” she said steadily. “Will you let me have it? I think I’ve reached my decision, but I am not fully certain of it and I’ll need all the certainty possible to me.”

“Of course,” said Mulligan. “You have, in fact, until morning of the day after tomorrow. We’ll wait.”

“We’ll wait after that as well,” said Hugh Akston, “though in your absence, if that be necessary.”

She stood by the window, facing them, and she felt a moment’s satisfaction in the knowledge that she stood straight, that her hands did not tremble, that her voice sounded as controlled, uncomplaining and unpitying as theirs; it gave her a moment’s feeling of a bond to them.

“If any part of your uncertainty,” said Galt, “is a conflict between your heart and your mind—follow your mind.”

“Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right,” said Hugh Akston, “but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don’t be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own.”

“Don’t rely on our knowledge of what’s best for your future,” said Mulligan. “We do know, but it can’t be best until you know it.”

“Don’t consider our interests or desires,” said Francisco. “You have no duty to anyone but yourself.”

She smiled, neither sadly nor gaily, thinking that none of it was the sort of advice she would have been given in the outer world. And knowing how desperately they wished to help her where no help was possible, she felt it was her part to give them reassurance.

“I forced my way here,” she said quietly, “and I was to bear responsibility for the consequences. I’m bearing it.”

Her reward was to see Galt smile; the smile was like a military decoration bestowed upon her.

Looking away, she remembered suddenly Jeff Alien, the tramp aboard the Comet, in the moment when she had admired him for attempting to tell her that he knew where he was going, to spare her the burden of his aimlessness. She smiled faintly, thinking that she had now experienced it in both roles and knew that no action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice. She felt an odd calm, almost a confident repose; she knew that it was tension, but the tension of a great clarity. She caught herself thinking: She’s functioning well in an emergency, I’ll be all right with her—and realized that she was thinking of herself.

“Let it go till day after tomorrow, Miss Taggart,” said Midas Mulligan. “Tonight you’re still here.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She remained by the window, while they went on discussing the valley’s business; it was their closing conference of the month. They had just finished dinner—and she thought of her first dinner in this house a month ago; she was wearing, as she had then worn, the gray suit that belonged in her office, not the peasant skirt that had been so easy to wear in the sun. I’m still here tonight, she thought, her hand pressed possessively to the window sill.

The sun had not yet vanished beyond the mountains, but the sky was an even, deep, deceptively clear blue that blended with the blue of invisible clouds into a single spread, hiding the sun; only the edges of the clouds were outlined by a thin thread of flame, and it looked like a glowing, twisted net of neon tubing, she thought... like a chart of winding rivers... like... like the map of a railroad traced in white fire on the sky.

She heard Mulligan giving Galt the names of those who were not returning to the outer world. “We have jobs for all of them,” said Mulligan. “In fact, there’s only ten or twelve men who’re going back this year—mostly to finish off, convert whatever they own and come here permanently. I think this was our last vacation month, because before another year is over we’ll all be living in this valley.”

“Good,” said Galt.

“We’ll have to, from the way things are going outside.”

“Yes.”

“Francisco,” said Mulligan, “you’ll come back in a few months?”

“In November at the latest,” said Francisco. “I’ll send you word by short wave, when I’m ready to come back—will you turn the furnace on in my house?”

“I will,” said Hugh Akston. “And I’ll have your supper ready for you when you arrive.”

“John, I take it for granted,” said Mulligan, “that you’re not returning to New York this time.”

Galt took a moment to glance at him, then answered evenly, “I have not decided it yet.”

She noticed the shocked swiftness with which Francisco and Mulligan bent forward to stare at him—and the slowness with which Hugh Akston’s glance moved to his face; Akston did not seem to be astonished.

“You’re not thinking of going back to that hell for another year, are you?” said Mulligan.

“I am.”

“But—good God, John!—what for?”

“I’ll tell you, when I’ve decided.”

“But there’s nothing left there for you to do. We got everybody we knew of or can hope to know of. Our list is completed, except for Hank Rearden—and we’ll get him before the year is over—and Miss Taggart, if she so chooses. That’s all. Your job is done. There’s nothing to look for, out there—except the final crash, when the roof comes down on their heads.”

“I know it.”

“John, yours is the one head I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

“You’ve never had to worry about me.”

“But don’t you realize what stage they’re coming to? They’re only one step away from open violence—hell, they’ve taken the step and sealed and declared it long ago!—but in one more moment they’ll see the full reality of what they’ve taken, exploding in their damned faces—plain, open, blind, arbitrary, blood shedding violence, running amuck, hitting anything and anyone at random. That’s what I don’t want to see you in the midst of.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“John, there’s no reason for you to take the risk,” said Francisco.

“What risk?”

“The looters are worried about the men who’ve disappeared. They’re suspecting something. You, of all people, shouldn’t stay there any longer. There’s always a chance that they might discover just who and what you are.”

“There’s some chance. Not much.”

“But there’s no reason whatever to take it. There’s nothing left that Ragnar and I can’t finish.”

Hugh Akston was watching them silently, leaning back in his chair; his face had that look of intensity, neither quite bitterness nor quite a SOS smile, with which a man watches a progression that interests him, but that lags a few steps behind his vision.

“If I go back,” said Galt, “it won’t be for our work. It will be to win the only thing I want from the world for myself, now that the work is done. I’ve taken nothing from the world and I’ve wanted nothing. But there’s one thing which it’s still holding and which is mine and which I won’t let it have. No, I don’t intend to break my oath, I won’t deal with the looters, I won’t be of any value or help to anyone out there, neither to looters nor neutrals—nor scabs. If I go, it won’t be for anyone’s sake but mine—and I don’t think I’m risking my life, but if I am—well, I’m now free to risk it.”

He was not looking at her, but she had to turn away and stand pressed against the window frame, because her hands were trembling.

“But, John!” cried Mulligan, waving his arm at the valley, “if anything happens to you, what would we—” He stopped abruptly and guiltily.

Galt chuckled. “What were you about to say?” Mulligan waved his hand sheepishly, in a gesture of dismissal. “Were you about to say that if anything happens to me, I’ll die as the worst failure in the world?”

“All right,” said Mulligan guiltily, “I won’t say it. I won’t say that we couldn’t get along without you—we can, I won’t beg you to stay here for our sake—I didn’t think I’d ever revert to that rotten old plea, but, boy!—what a temptation it was, I can almost see why people do it. I know that whatever it is you want, if you wish to risk your life, that’s all there is to it—but I’m thinking only that it’s... oh God, John, it’s such a valuable life!”

Galt smiled. “I know it. That’s why I don’t think I’m risking it—I think I’ll win.”

Francisco was now silent, he was watching Galt intently, with a frown of wonder, not as if he had found an answer, but as if he had suddenly glimpsed a question.

“Look, John,” said Mulligan, “since you haven’t decided whether you’ll go—you haven’t decided it yet, have you?”

“No, not yet.”

“Since you haven’t, would you let me remind you of a few things, just for you to consider?”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s the chance dangers that I’m afraid of—the senseless, unpredictable dangers of a world falling apart. Consider the physical risks of complex machinery in the hands of blind fools and fear-crazed cowards.

Just think of their railroads—you’d be taking a chance on some such horror as that Winston tunnel incident every time you stepped aboard a train—and there will be more incidents of that kind, coming faster and faster. They’ll reach the stage where no day will pass without a major wreck.”

“I know it.”

“And the same will be happening in every other industry, wherever machines are used—the machines which they thought could replace our minds. Plane crashes, oil tank explosions, blast-furnace break-outs, high-tension wire electrocutions, subway cave-ins and trestle collapses—they’ll see them all. The very machines that had made their life so safe, will now make it a continuous peril.”

“I know it.”

“I know that you know it, but have you considered it in every specific detail? Have you allowed yourself to visualize it? I want you to see the exact picture of what it is that you propose to enter—before you decide whether anything can justify your entering it. You know that the cities will be hit worst of all. The cities were made by the railroads and will go with them.”

“That’s right.”

“When the rails are cut, the city of New York will starve in two days.

That’s all the supply of food it’s got. It’s fed by a continent three thousand miles long. How will they carry food to New York? By directive and oxcart? But first, before it happens, they’ll go through the whole of the agony—through the shrinking, the shortages, the hunger riots, the stampeding violence in the midst of the growing stillness.”

“They will.”

“They’ll lose their airplanes first, then their automobiles, then their trucks, then their horse carts.”

“They will.”

“Their factories will stop, then their furnaces and their radios. Then their electric light system will go.”

“It will.”

“There’s only a worn thread holding that continent together. There will be one train a day, then one train a week—then the Taggart Bridge will collapse and—”

“No, it won’t!”

It was her voice and they whirled to her. Her face was white, but calmer than it had been when she had answered them last.

Slowly, Galt rose to his feet and inclined his head, as in acceptance of a verdict. “You’ve made your decision,” he said.

“I have.”

“Dagny,” said Hugh Akston, “I’m sorry.” He spoke softly, with effort, as if his words were struggling and failing to fill the silence of the room. “I wish it were possible not to see this happen, I would have preferred anything—except to see you stay here by default of the courage of your convictions.”

She spread her hands, palms out, her arms at her sides, in a gesture of simple frankness, and said, addressing them all, her manner so calm that she could afford to show emotion, “I want you to know this: I have wished it were possible for me to die in one more month, so that I could spend it in this valley. This is how much I’ve wanted to remain. But so long as I choose to go on living, I can’t desert a battle which I think is mine to fight.”

“Of course,” said Mulligan respectfully, “if you still think it.”

“If you want to know the one reason that’s taking me back, I’ll tell you; I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all the greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours, which was made by us and is still ours by right—because I cannot believe that men can refuse to see, that they can remain blind and deaf to us forever, when the truth is ours and their lives depend on accepting it. They still love their lives—and that is the uncorrupted remnant of their minds. So long as men desire to live, I cannot lose my battle.”

“Do they?” said Hugh Akston softly. “Do they desire it? No, don’t answer me now. I know that the answer was the hardest thing for any of us to grasp and to accept. Just take that question back with you, as the last premise left for you to check.”

“You’re leaving as our friend,” said Midas Mulligan, “and we’ll be fighting everything you’ll do, because we know you’re wrong, but it’s not you that we’ll be damning.”

“You’ll come back,” said Hugh Akston, “because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We’ll wait for you—and, Dagny, when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you’ve borne so well.”

“Thank you,” she said, closing her eyes.

“We must discuss the conditions of your departure,” said Galt; he spoke in the dispassionate manner of an executive. “First, you must give us your word that you will not disclose our secret or any part of it—neither our cause nor our existence nor this valley nor your whereabouts for the past month—to anyone in the outer world, not at any time or for any purpose whatsoever.”

“I give you my word.”

“Second, you must never attempt to find this valley again. You are not to come here uninvited. Should you break the first condition, it will not place us in serious danger. Should you break the second—it will. It is not our policy ever to be at the arbitrary mercy of the good faith of another person, or at the mercy of a promise that cannot be enforced. Nor can we expect you to place our interests above your own. Since you believe that your course is right, the day may come when you may find it necessary to lead our enemies to this valley. We shall, therefore, leave you no means to do it. You will be taken out of the valley by plane, blindfolded, and you will be flown a distance sufficient to make it impossible for you ever to retrace the course.”

She inclined her head. “You are right.”

“Your plane has been repaired. Do you wish to reclaim it by signing a draft on your account at the Mulligan Bank?”

“No.”

“Then we shall hold it, until such time as you choose to pay for it.

Day after tomorrow, I will take you in my plane to a point outside the valley and leave you within reach of further transportation.”

She inclined her head. “Very well.”

It had grown dark, when they left Midas Mulligan’s. The trail back to Galt’s house led across the valley, past Francisco’s cabin, and the three of them walked home together. A few squares of lighted windows hung scattered through the darkness, and the first streams of mist were weaving slowly across the panes, like shadows cast by a distant sea.

They walked in silence, but the sound of their steps, blending into a single, steady beat, was like a speech to be grasped and not to be uttered in any other form.

After a while, Francisco said, “It changes nothing, it only makes the span a little longer, and the last stretch is always the hardest—but it’s the last.”

“I will hope so,” she said. In a moment, she repeated quietly, “The last is the hardest.” She turned to Galt. “May I make one request?”

“Yes.”

“Will you let me go tomorrow?”

“If you wish.”

When Francisco spoke again, moments later, it was as if he were addressing the unnamed wonder in her mind; his voice had the tone of answering, a question: “Dagny, all three of us are in love”—she jerked her head to him—“with the same thing, no matter what its forms. Don’t wonder why you feel no breach among us. You’ll be one of us, so long as you’ll remain in love with your rails and your engines—and they’ll lead you back to us, no matter how many times you lose your way. The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“For what?”

“For... for the way you sound.”

“How do I sound? Name it, Dagny.”

“You sound... as if you’re happy.”

“I am—in exactly the same way you are. Don’t tell me what you feel. I know it. But, you see, the measure of the hell you’re able to endure is the measure of your love. The hell I couldn’t bear to witness would be to see you being indifferent.”

She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt, yet feeling that he was right.

Clots of mist were drifting, like smoke, across the moon, and in the diffused glow she could not distinguish the expressions of their faces, as she walked between them: the only expressions to perceive were the straight silhouettes of their bodies, the unbroken sound of their steps and her own feeling that she wished to walk on and on, a feeling she could not define, except that it was neither doubt nor pain. When they approached his cabin, Francisco stopped, the gesture of his hand embracing them both as he pointed to his door. “Will you come in—since it’s to be our last night together for some time? Let’s have a drink to that future of which all three of us are certain.”

“Are we?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Galt, “we are.”

She looked at their faces when Francisco switched on the light in his house. She could not define their expressions, it was not happiness or any emotion pertaining to joy, their faces were taut and solemn, but it was a glowing solemnity—she thought—if this were possible, and the odd glow she felt within her, told her that her own face had the same look.

Francisco reached for three glasses from a cupboard, but stopped, as at a sudden thought. He placed one glass on the table, then reached for the two silver goblets of Sebastian d’Anconia and placed them beside it.

“Are you going straight to New York, Dagny?” he asked, in the calm, unstrained tone of a host, bringing out a bottle of old wine, “Yes,” she answered as calmly.

“I’m flying to Buenos Aires day after tomorrow,” he said, uncorking the bottle. “I’m not sure whether I’ll be back in New York later, but if I am, it will be dangerous for you to see me.”

“I won’t care about that,” she said, “unless you feel that I’m not entitled to see you any longer.”

“True, Dagny. You’re not. Not in New York.”

He was pouring the wine and he glanced up at Galt. “John, when will you decide whether you’re going back or staying here?”

Galt looked straight at him, then said slowly, in the tone of a man who knows all the consequences of his words, “I have decided, Francisco. I’m going back.”

Francisco’s hand stopped. For a long moment, he was seeing nothing but Galt’s face. Then his eyes moved to hers. He put the bottle down and he did not step back, but it was as if his glance drew back to a wide range, to include them both, “But of course,” he said.

He looked as if he had moved still farther and were now seeing the whole spread of their years; his voice had an even, uninflected sound, quality that matched the size of the vision.

“I knew it twelve years ago,” he said. “I knew it before you could have known, and it’s I who should have seen that you would see. That night, when you called us to New York, I thought of it then as”—he was speaking to Galt, but his eyes moved to Dagny—“as everything that you were seeking... everything you told us to live for or die, if necessary. I should have seen that you would think it, too. It could not have been otherwise. It is as it had—and ought—to be. It was set then, twelve years ago.” He looked at Galt and chuckled softly. “And you say that it’s I who’ve taken the hardest beating?”

He turned with too swift a movement—then, too slowly, as if in deliberate emphasis, he completed the task of pouring the wine, filling the three vessels on the table. He picked up the two silver goblets, looked down at them for the pause of an instant, then extended one to Dagny, the other to Galt.

“Take it,” he said. “You’ve earned it—and it wasn’t chance.”

Galt took the goblet from his hand, but it was as if the acceptance was done by their eyes as they looked at each other.

“I would have given anything to let it be otherwise,” said Galt, “except that which is beyond giving.”

She held her goblet, she looked at Francisco and she let him see her eyes glance at Galt. “Yes,” she said in the tone of an answer, “But I have not earned it—and what you’ve paid, I’m paying it now, and I don’t know whether I’ll ever earn enough to hold clear title, but if hell is the price—and the measure—then let me be the greediest of the three of us.”

As they drank, as she stood, her eyes closed, feeling the liquid motion of the wine inside her throat, she knew that for all three of them this was the most tortured—and the most exultant—moment they had ever reached.

She did not speak to Galt, as they walked down the last stretch of the trail to his house. She did not turn her head to him, feeling that even a glance would be too dangerous. She felt, in their silence, both the calm of a total understanding and the tension of the knowledge that they were not to name the things they understood.

But she faced him, when they were in his living room, with full confidence and as if in sudden certainty of a right—the certainty that she would not break and that it was now safe to speak. She said evenly, neither as plea nor as triumph, merely as the statement of a fact, “You are going back to the outer world because I will be there.”

“Yes.”

“I do not want you to go.”

“You have no choice about it.”

“You are going for my sake.”

“No, for mine.”

“Will you allow me to see you there?”

“No.”

“I am not to see you?”

“No.”

“I am not to know where you are or what you do?”

“You’re not.”

“Will you be watching me, as you did before?”

“More so.”

“Is your purpose to protect me?”

“No.”

“What is it, then?”

“To be there on the day when you decide to join us.”

She looked at him attentively, permitting herself no other reaction, but as if groping for an answer to the first point she had not fully understood.

“All the rest of us will be gone,” he explained. “It will become too dangerous to remain. I will remain as your last key, before the door of this valley closes altogether.”

“Oh!” She choked it off before it became a moan. Then, regaining the manner of impersonal detachment, she asked, “Suppose I were to tell you that my decision is final and that I am never to join you?”

“It would be a lie.”

“Suppose I were now to decide that I wish to make it final and to stand by it, no matter what the future?”

“No matter what future evidence you observe and what convictions you form?”

“Yes.”

“That would be worse than a lie.”

“You are certain that I have made the wrong decision?”

“I am.”

“Do you believe that one must be responsible for one’s own errors?”

“I do.”

“Then why aren’t you letting me bear the consequences of mine?”

“I am and you will.”

“If I find, when it is too late, that I want to return to this valley—why should you have to bear the risk of keeping that door open to me?”

“I don’t have to. I wouldn’t do it if I had no selfish end to gain.”

“What selfish end?”

“I want you here.”

She closed her eyes and inclined her head in open admission of defeat—defeat in the argument and in her attempt to face calmly the full meaning of that which she was leaving.

Then she raised her head and, as if she had absorbed his kind of frankness, she looked at him, hiding neither her suffering nor her longing nor her calm, knowing that all three were in her glance.

His face was as it had been in the sunlight of the moment when she had seen it for the first time: a face of merciless serenity and unflinching perceptiveness, without pain or fear or guilt. She thought that were it possible for her to stand looking at him, at the straight lines of his eyebrows over the dark green eyes, at the curve of the shadow underscoring the shape of his mouth, at the poured-metal planes of his skin in the open collar of his shirt and the casually immovable posture of his legs—she would wish to spend the rest of her life on this spot and in this manner. And in the next instant she knew that if her wish were granted, the contemplation would lose all meaning, because she would have betrayed all the things that gave it value.

Then, not as memory, but as an experience of the present, she felt herself reliving the moment when she had stood at the window of her room in New York, looking at a fogbound city, at the unattainable shape of Atlantis sinking out of reach—and she knew that she was now seeing the answer to that moment. She felt, not the words she had then addressed to the city, but that untranslated sensation from which the words had come: You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—

Aloud, she said, “I want you to know this. I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle”—you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city, the wordless voice within her was saying, and whose world I had wanted to build—“Now I know that I was fighting for this valley”—it is my love for you that had kept me moving—“It was this valley that I saw as possible and would exchange for nothing less and would not give up to a mindless evil”—my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face—“I am going back to fight for this valley—to release it from its underground, to regain for it its full and rightful realm, to let the earth belong to you in fact, as it does in spirit—and to meet you again on the day when I’m able to deliver to you the whole of the world—or, if I fail, to remain in exile from this valley to the end of my life”—but what is left of my life will still be yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’m never to pronounce, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t—“I will fight for it, even if I have to fight against you, even if you damn me as a traitor... even if I am never to see you again.”

He had stood without moving, he had listened with no change in his face, only his eyes had looked at her as if he were hearing every word, even the words she had not pronounced. He answered, with the same look, as if the look were holding some circuit not yet to be broken, his voice catching some tone of hers, as if in signal of the same code, a voice with no sign of emotion except in the spacing of the words: “If you fail, as men have failed in their quest for a vision that should have been possible, yet has remained forever beyond their reach—if, like them, you come to think that one’s highest values are not to be attained and one’s greatest vision is not to be made real—don’t damn this earth, as they did, don’t damn existence. You have seen the Atlantis they were seeking, it is here, it exists—but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind—not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind—as one’s only possession and key. You will not enter it until you learn that you do not need to convince or to conquer the world. When you learn it, you will see that through all the years of your struggle, nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear. Through all those years, that which you most wished to win was waiting for you”—he looked at her as if he were speaking to the unspoken words in her mind—“waiting as unremittingly as you were fighting, as passionately, as desperately—but with a greater certainty than yours. Go out to continue your struggle. Go on carrying unchosen burdens, taking undeserved punishment and believing that justice can be served by the offer of your own spirit to the most unjust of tortures. But in your worst and darkest moments, remember that you have seen another kind of world. Remember that you can reach it whenever you choose to see. Remember that it will be waiting and that it’s real, it’s possible—it’s yours.”

Then, turning his head a little, his voice as clear, but his eyes breaking the circuit, he asked, “What time do you wish to leave tomorrow?”

“Oh... ! As early as it will be convenient for you.”

“Then have breakfast ready at seven and we’ll take off at eight.”

“I will.”

He reached into his pocket and extended to her a small, shining disk which she could not distinguish at first. He dropped it on the palm of her hand: it was a five-dollar gold piece.

“The last of your wages for the month,” he said.

Her fingers snapped closed over the coin too tightly, but she answered calmly and tonelessly, “Thank you.”

“Good night, Miss Taggart.”

“Good night.”

She did not sleep in the hours that were still left to her. She sat on the floor of her room, her face pressed to the bed, feeling nothing but the sense of his presence beyond the wall. At times, she felt as if he were before her, as if she were sitting at his feet. She spent her last night with him in this manner.

She left the valley as she had come, carrying away nothing that belonged to it. She left the few possessions she had acquired—her peasant skirt, a blouse, an apron, a few pieces of underwear—folded neatly in a drawer of the chest in her room. She looked at them for a moment, before she closed the drawer, thinking that if she came back, she would, perhaps, still find them there. She took nothing with her but the five-dollar gold piece and the band of tape still wound about her ribs.

The sun touched the peaks of the mountains, drawing a shining circle as a frontier of the valley—when she climbed aboard the plane.

She leaned back in the seat beside him and looked at Galt’s face bent over her, as it had been bent when she had opened her eyes on the first morning. Then she closed her eyes and felt his hands tying the blindfold across her face.

She heard the blast of the motor, not as sound, but as the shudder of an explosion inside her body; only it felt like a distant shudder, as if the person feeling it would have been hurt if she were not so far away.

She did not know when the wheels left the ground or when the plane crossed the circle of the peaks. She lay still, with the pounding beat of the motor as her only perception of space, as if she were carried inside a current of sound that rocked once in a while. The sound came from his engine, from the control of his hands on the wheel; she held onto that; the rest was to be endured, not resisted.

She lay still, her legs stretched forward, her hands on the arms of the seat, with no sense of motion, not even her own, to give her a sense of time, with no space, no sight, no future, with the night of closed eyelids under the pressure of the cloth—and with the knowledge of his presence beside her as her single, unchanging reality, They did not speak. Once, she said suddenly, “Mr. Galt.”

“Yes?”

“No. Nothing. I just wanted to know whether you were still there.”

“I will always be there.”

She did not know for how many miles the memory of the sound of words seemed like a small landmark rolling away into the distance, then vanishing. Then there was nothing but the stillness of an indivisible present.

She did not know whether a day had passed or an hour, when she felt the downward, plunging motion which meant that they were about to land or to crash; the two possibilities seemed equal to her mind.

She felt the jolt of the wheels against the ground as an oddly delayed sensation: as if some fraction of time had gone to make her believe it.

She felt the running streak of jerky motion, then the jar of the stop and of silence, then the touch of his hands on her hair, removing the blindfold.

She saw a glaring sunlight, a stretch of scorched weeds going off into the sky, with no mountains to stop it, a deserted highway and the hazy outline of a town about a mile away. She glanced at her watch: forty seven minutes ago, she had still been in the valley.

“You’ll find a Taggart station there,” he said, pointing at the town, “and you’ll be able to take a train.”

She nodded, as if she understood.

He did not follow her as she descended to the ground. He leaned across the wheel toward the open door of the plane, and they looked at each other. She stood, her face raised to him, a faint wind stirring her hair, the straight line of her shoulders sculptured by the trim suit of a business executive amidst the flat immensity of an empty prairie.

The movement of his hand pointed east, toward some invisible cities.

“Don’t look for me out there,” he said. “You will not find me—until you want me for what I am. And when you’ll want me, I’ll be the easiest man to find.”

She heard the sound of the door falling closed upon him; it seemed louder than the blast of the propeller that followed. She watched the run of the plane’s wheels and the trail of weeds left flattened behind them.

Then she saw a strip of sky between wheels and weeds.

She looked around her. A reddish haze of heat hung over the shapes of the town in the distance, and the shapes seemed to sag under a rusty tinge; above their roofs, she saw the remnant of a crumbled smokestack. She saw a dry, yellow scrap rustling faintly in the weeds beside her: it was a piece of newspaper. She looked at these objects blankly, unable to make them real.

She raised her eyes to the plane. She watched the spread of its wings grow smaller in the sky, draining away in its wake the sound of its motor. It kept rising, wings first, like a long silver cross; then the curve of its motion went following the sky, dropping slowly closer to the earth; then it seemed not to move any longer, but only to shrink. She watched it like a star in the process of extinction, while it shrank from cross to dot to a burning spark which she was no longer certain of seeing. When she saw that the spread of the sky was strewn with such sparks all over, she knew that the plane was gone.

CHAPTER III ANTI-GREED

“What am I doing here?” asked Dr. Robert Stadler. “Why was I asked to come here? I demand an explanation. I’m not accustomed to being dragged halfway across a continent without rhyme, reason or notice.”

Dr. Floyd Ferris smiled. “Which makes me appreciate it all the more that you did come, Dr. Stadler.” It was impossible to tell whether his voice had a tone of gratitude—or of gloating.

The sun was beating down upon them and Dr. Stadler felt a streak of perspiration oozing along his temple. He could not hold an angrily, embarrassingly private discussion in the middle of a crowd streaming to fill the benches of the grandstand around them—the discussion which he had tried and failed to obtain for the last three days. It occurred to him that that was precisely the reason why his meeting with Dr. Ferris had been delayed to this moment; but he brushed the thought aside, just as he brushed some insect buzzing to reach his wet temple.

“Why was I unable to get in touch with you?” he asked. The fraudulent weapon of sarcasm now seemed to sound less effective than ever, but it was Dr. Stadler’s only weapon: “Why did you find it necessary to send me messages on official stationery worded in a style proper, I’m sure, for Army”—orders, he was about to say, but didn’t—“communications, but certainly not for scientific correspondence?”

“It is a government matter,” said Dr. Ferris gently.

“Do you realize that I was much too busy and that this meant an interruption of my work?”

“Oh yes,” said Dr. Ferris noncommittally.

“Do you realize that I could have refused to come?”

“But you didn’t,” said Dr. Ferris softly.

“Why was I given no explanation? Why didn’t you come for me in person, instead of sending those incredible young hooligans with their mysterious gibberish that sounded half-science, half-pulp-magazine?”

“I was too busy,” said Dr. Ferris blandly.

“Then would you mind telling me what you’re doing in the middle of a plain in Iowa—and what I’m doing here, for that matter?” He waved contemptuously at the dusty horizon of an empty prairie and at the three wooden grandstands. The stands were newly erected, and the wood, too, seemed to perspire; he could see drops of resin sparkling in the sun.

“We are about to witness an historical event, Dr. Stadler. An occasion which will become a milestone on the road of science, civilization, social welfare and political adaptability.” Dr. Ferris’ voice had the tone of a public relations man’s memorized handout. “The turning point of a new era.”

“What event? What new era?”

“As you will observe, only the most distinguished citizens, the cream of our intellectual elite, have been chosen for the special privilege of witnessing this occasion. We could not omit your name, could we?—and we feel certain, of course, that we can count on your loyalty and cooperation.”

He could not catch Dr. Ferris’ eyes. The grandstands were rapidly filling with people, and Dr. Ferris kept interrupting himself constantly to wave to nondescript newcomers, whom Dr. Stadler had never seen before, but who were personages, as he could tell by the particular shade of gaily informal deference in Ferris’ waving. They all seemed to know Dr. Ferris and to seek him out, as if he were the master of ceremonies—or the star—of the occasion.

“If you would kindly be specific for a moment,” said Dr. Stadler, “and tell me what—”

“Hi, Spud!” called Dr. Ferris, waving to a portly, white-haired man who filled the full-dress uniform of a general.

Dr. Stadler raised his voice: “I said, if you would kindly concentrate long enough to explain to me what in hell is going on—”

“But it’s very simple. It’s the final triumph of... You’ll have to excuse me a minute, Dr. Stadler,” said Dr. Ferris hastily, tearing forward, like an over trained lackey at the sound of a bell, in the direction of what looked like a group of aging rowdies; he turned back long enough to add two words which he seemed reverently to consider as a full explanation: “The press!”

Dr. Stadler sat down on the wooden bench, feeling unaccountably reluctant to brush against anything around him. The three grandstands were spaced at intervals in a semi-curve, like the tiers of a small, private circus, with room for some three hundred people; they seemed built for the viewing of some spectacle—but they faced the emptiness of a flat prairie stretching off to the horizon, with nothing in sight but the dark blotch of a farmhouse miles away.

There were radio microphones in front of one stand, which seemed reserved for the press. There was a contraption resembling a portable switchboard in front of the stand reserved for officials; a few levers of polished metal sparkled in the sun on the face of the switchboard. In an improvised parking lot behind the stands, the glitter of luxurious new cars seemed a brightly reassuring sight. But it was the building that stood on a knoll some thousand feet away that gave Dr. Stadler a vague sense of uneasiness. It was a small, squat structure of unknown purpose, with massive stone walls, no windows except a few slits protected by stout iron bars, and a large dome, grotesquely too heavy for the rest, that seemed to press the structure down into the soil. A few outlets protruded from the base of the dome, in loose, irregular shapes, resembling badly poured clay funnels; they did not seem to belong to an industrial age or to any known usage. The building had an air of silent malevolence, like a puffed, venomous mushroom; it was obviously modern, but its sloppy, rounded, ineptly unspecific lines made it look like a primitive structure unearthed in the heart of the jungle, devoted to some secret rites of savagery.

Dr. Stadler sighed with irritation; he was tired of secrets. “Confidential” and “Top Confidential” had been the words stamped on the invitation which had demanded that he travel to Iowa on a two-day notice and for an unspecified purpose. Two young men, who called themselves physicists, had appeared at the Institute to escort him; his calls to Ferris’ office in Washington had remained unanswered. The young men had talked—through an exhausting trip by government plane, then a clammy ride in a government car—about science, emergencies, social equilibriums and the need of secrecy, till he knew less than he had known at the start; he noticed only that two words kept recurring in their jabber, which had also appeared in the text of the invitation, two words that had an ominous sound when involving an unknown issue: the demands for his “loyalty” and “co-operation.”

The young men had deposited him on a bench in the front row of the grandstand and had vanished, like the folding gear of a mechanism, leaving him to the sudden presence of Dr. Ferris in person. Now, watching the scene around him, watching Dr. Ferris’ vague, excited, loosely casual gestures in the midst of a group of newsmen, he had an impression of bewildering confusion, of senseless, chaotic inefficiency—and of a smooth machine working to produce the exact degree of that impression needed at the exact moment.

He felt a single, sudden flash of panic, in which, as in a flash of lightning, he permitted himself to know that he felt a desperate desire to escape. But he slammed his mind shut against it. He knew that the darkest secret of the occasion—more crucial, more untouchable, more deadly than whatever was hidden in the mushroom building—was that which had made him agree to come.

He would never have to learn his own motive, he thought; he thought it, not by means of words, but by means of the brief, vicious spasm of an emotion that resembled irritation and felt like acid. The words that stood in his mind, as they had stood when he had agreed to come, were like a voodoo formula which one recites when it is needed and beyond which one must not look: What can you do when you have to deal with people?

He noticed that the stand reserved for those whom Ferris had called the intellectual elite was larger than the stand prepared for government officials. He caught himself feeling a swift little sneak of pleasure at the thought that he had been placed in the front row. He turned to glance at the tiers behind him. The sensation he experienced was like a small, gray shock: that random, faded, shopworn assembly was not his conception of an intellectual elite. He saw defensively belligerent men and tastelessly dressed women—he saw mean, rancorous, suspicious faces that bore the one mark incompatible with a standard bearer of the intellect: the mark of uncertainty. He could find no face he knew, no face to recognize as famous and none likely ever to achieve such recognition.

He wondered by what standard these people had been selected.

Then he noticed a gangling figure in the second row, the figure of an elderly man with a long, slack face that seemed faintly familiar to him, though he could recall nothing about it, except a vague’ memory, as of a photograph seen in some unsavory publication. He leaned toward a woman and asked, pointing, “Could you tell me the name of that gentleman?” The woman answered in a whisper of awed respect, “That is Dr. Simon Pritchett!” Dr. Stadler turned away, wishing no one would see him, wishing no one would ever learn that he had been a member of that group.

He raised his eyes and saw that Ferris was leading the whole press gang toward him. He saw Ferris sweeping his arm at him, in the manner of a tourist guide, and declaring, when they were close enough to be heard, “But why should you waste your time on me, when there is the source of today’s achievement, the man who made it all possible—Dr. Robert Stadler!”

It seemed to him for an instant that he saw an incongruous look on the worn, cynical faces of the newsmen, a look that was not quite respect, expectation or hope, but more like an echo of these, like a faint reflection of the look they might have worn in their youth on hearing the name of Robert Stadler. In that instant, he felt an impulse which he would not acknowledge: the impulse to tell them that he knew nothing about today’s event, that his power counted for less than theirs, that he had been brought here as a pawn in some confidence game, almost as... as a prisoner.

Instead, he heard himself answering their questions in the smug, condescending tone of a man who shares all the secrets of the highest authorities: “Yes, the State Science Institute is proud of its record of public service... The State Science Institute is not the tool of any private interests or personal greed, it is devoted to the welfare of mankind, to the good of humanity as a whole—” spouting, like a dictaphone, the sickening generalities he had heard from Dr. Ferris.

He would not permit himself to know that what he felt was self loathing; he identified the emotion, but not its object; it was loathing for the men around him, he thought; it was they who were forcing him to go through this shameful performance. What can you do—he thought—when you have to deal with people?

The newsmen were making brief notes of his answers. Their faces now had the look of automatons acting out the routine of pretending that they were hearing news in the empty utterances of another automaton.

“Dr. Stadler,” asked one of them, pointing at the building on the knoll, “is it true that you consider Project X the greatest achievement of the State Science Institute?”

There was a dead drop of silence.

“Project... X... ?” said Dr. Stadler.

He knew that something was ominously wrong in the tone of his voice, because he saw the heads of the newsmen go up, as at the sound of an alarm; he saw them waiting, their pencils poised.

For one instant, while he felt the muscles of his face cracking into the fraud of a smile, he felt a formless, an almost supernatural terror, as if he sensed again the silent working of some smooth machine, as if he were caught in it, part of it and doing its irrevocable will. “Project X?” he said softly, in the mysterious tone of a conspirator. “Well, gentlemen, the value—and the motive—of any achievement of the State Science Institute are not to be doubted, since it is a non-profit venture—need I say more?”

He raised his head and noticed that Dr. Ferris had stood on the edge of the group through the whole of the interview. He wondered whether he imagined that the look on Dr. Ferris’ face now seemed less tense—and more impertinent.

Two resplendent cars came shooting at full speed into the parking lot and stopped with a flourish of screeching brakes. The newsmen deserted him in the middle of a sentence and went running to meet the group alighting from the cars.

Dr. Stadler turned to Ferris. “What is Project X?” he asked sternly.

Dr. Ferris smiled in a manner of innocence and insolence together.

“A non-profit venture,” he answered—and went running off to meet the newcomers.

From the respectful whispers of the crowd, Dr. Stadler learned that the little man in a wilted linen suit, who looked like a shyster, striding briskly in the center of the new group, was Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State. Mr. Thompson was smiling, frowning and barking answers to the newsmen. Dr. Ferris was weaving through the group, with the grace of a cat rubbing against sundry legs.

The group came closer and he saw Ferris steering them in his direction. “Mr. Thompson,” said Dr. Ferris sonorously, as they approached, “may I present Dr. Robert Stadler?”

Dr. Stadler saw the little shyster’s eyes studying him for the fraction of a second: the eyes had a touch of superstitious awe, as at the sight of a phenomenon from a mystical realm forever incomprehensible to Mr. Thompson—and they had the piercing, calculating shrewdness of a ward heeler who feels certain that nothing is immune from his standards, a glance like the visual equivalent of the words: What’s your angle?

“It’s an honor, Doctor, an honor, I’m sure,” said Mr. Thompson briskly, shaking his hand.

He learned that the tall, stoop-shouldered man with a crew haircut was Mr. Wesley Mouch. He did not catch the names of the others, whose hands he shook. As the group proceeded toward the officials’ grandstand, he was left with the burning sensation of a discovery he dared not face: the discovery that he had felt anxiously pleased by the little shyster’s nod of approval.

A party of young attendants, who looked like movie theater ushers, appeared from somewhere with handcarts of glittering objects, which they proceeded to distribute to the assembly. The objects were field glasses. Dr. Ferris took his place at the microphone of a public-address system by the officials’ stand. At a signal from Wesley Mouch, his voice boomed suddenly over the prairie, an unctuous, fraudulently solemn voice magnified by the microphone inventor’s ingenuity into the sound and power of a giant: “Ladies and gentlemen... !”

The crowd was struck into silence, all heads jerking unanimously toward the graceful figure of Dr. Floyd Ferris.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have been chosen—in recognition of your distinguished public service and social loyalty—to witness the unveiling of a scientific achievement of such tremendous importance, such staggering scope, such epoch-making possibilities that up to this moment it has been known only to a very few and only as Project X.”

Dr. Stadler focused his field glasses on the only thing in sight—on the blotch of the distant farm.

He saw that it was the deserted ruin of a farmhouse, which had obviously been abandoned years ago. The light of the sky showed through the naked ribs of the roof, and jagged bits of glass framed the darkness of empty windows. He saw a sagging barn, the rusted tower of a water wheel, and the remnant of a tractor lying upturned with its treads in the air.

Dr. Ferris was talking about the crusaders of science and about the years of selfless devotion, unremitting toil and persevering research that had gone into Project X.

It was odd—thought Dr. Stadler, studying the ruins of the farm—that there should be a herd of goats in the midst of such desolation.

There were six or seven of them, some drowsing, some munching lethargically at whatever grass they could find among the sun-scorched weeds.

“Project X,” Dr. Ferris was saying, “was devoted to some special research in the field of sound. The science of sound has astonishing aspects, which laymen would scarcely suspect...”

Some fifty feet away from the farmhouse, Dr. Stadler saw a structure, obviously new and of no possible purpose whatever: it looked like a few spans of a steel trestle, rising into empty space, supporting nothing, leading nowhere.

Dr. Ferris was now talking about the nature of sound vibrations.

Dr. Stadler aimed his field glasses at the horizon beyond the farm, but there was nothing else to be seen for dozens of miles. The sudden, straining motion of one of the goats brought his eyes back to the herd.

He noticed that the goats were chained to stakes driven at intervals into the ground.

“... And it was discovered,” said Dr. Ferris, “that there are certain frequencies of sound vibration which no structure, organic or inorganic, can withstand...”

Dr. Stadler noticed a silvery spot bouncing over the weeds among the herd. It was a kid that had not been chained; it kept leaping and weaving about its mother.

“... The sound ray is controlled by a panel inside the giant underground laboratory,” said Dr. Ferris, pointing at the building on the knoll. “That panel is known to us affectionately as the ‘Xylophone’—because one must be darn careful to strike the right keys, or, rather, to pull the right levers. For this special occasion, an extension Xylophone, connected to the one inside, has been erected here”—he pointed to the switchboard in front of the officials’ stand—“so that you may witness the entire operation and see the simplicity of the whole procedure...”

Dr. Stadler found pleasure in watching the kid, a soothing, reassuring kind of pleasure. The little creature seemed barely a week old, it looked like a ball of white fur with graceful long legs, it kept bounding in a manner of deliberate, gaily ferocious awkwardness, all four of its legs held stiff and straight. It seemed to be leaping at the sunrays, at the summer air, at the joy of discovering its own existence.

“... The sound ray is invisible, inaudible and fully controllable in respect to target, direction and range. Its first public test, which you are about to witness, has been set to cover a small sector, a mere two miles, in perfect safety, with all space cleared for twenty miles beyond. The present generating equipment in our laboratory is capable of producing rays to cover—through the outlets which you may observe under the dome—the entire countryside within a radius of a hundred miles, a circle with a periphery extending from the shore of the Mississippi, roughly from the bridge of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, to Des Moines and Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Austin, Minnesota, to Woodman, Wisconsin, to Rock Island, Illinois. This is only a modest beginning. We possess the technical knowledge to build generators with a range of two and three hundred miles—but due to the fact that we were unable to obtain in time a sufficient quantity of a highly heat resistant metal, such as Rearden Metal, we had to be satisfied with our present equipment and radius of control. In honor of our great executive, Mr. Thompson, under whose far-sighted administration the State Science Institute was granted the funds without which Project X would not have been possible, this great invention will henceforth be known as the Thompson Harmonizer!”

The crowd applauded. Mr. Thompson sat motionless, with his face held self-consciously stiff. Dr. Stadler felt certain that this small-time shyster had had as little to do with the Project as any of the movie usher attendants, that he possessed neither the mind nor the initiative nor even the sufficient degree of malice to cause a new gopher trap to be brought into the world, that he, too, was only the pawn of a silent machine—a machine that had no center, no leader, no direction, a machine that had not been set in motion by Dr. Ferris or Wesley Mouch, or any of the cowed creatures in the grandstands, or any of the creatures behind the scenes—an impersonal, unthinking, unembodied machine, of which none was the driver and all were the pawns, each to the degree of his evil. Dr. Stadler gripped the edge of the bench: he felt a desire to leap to his feet and run.

“... As to the function and the purpose of the sound ray, I shall say nothing. I shall let it speak for itself. You will now see it work.

When Dr. Blodgett pulls the levers of the Xylophone, I suggest that you keep your eyes on the target—which is that farmhouse two miles away. There will be nothing else to see. The ray itself is invisible. It has long been conceded by all progressive thinkers that there are no entities, only actions—and no values, only consequences. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see the action and the consequences of the Thompson Harmonizer.”

Dr. Ferris bowed, walked slowly away from the microphone and came to take his seat on the bench beside Dr. Stadler.

A youngish, fattish kind of man took his stand by the switchboard—and raised his eyes expectantly toward Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson looked blankly bewildered for an instant, as if something had slipped his mind, until Wesley Mouch leaned over and whispered some word into his ear. “Contact!” said Mr. Thompson loudly.

Dr. Stadler could not bear to watch the graceful, undulating, effeminate motion of Dr. Blodgett’s hand as it pulled the first lever of the switchboard, then the next. He raised his field glasses and looked at the farmhouse.

In the instant when he focused his lens, a goat was pulling at its chain, reaching placidly for a tall, dry thistle. In the next instant, the goat rose into the air, upturned, its legs stretched upward and jerking, then fell into a gray pile made of seven goats in convulsions. By the time Dr. Stadler believed it, the pile was motionless, except for one beast’s leg sticking out of the mass, stiff as a rod and shaking as in a strong wind. The farmhouse tore into strips of clapboard and went down, followed by a geyser of the bricks of its chimney. The tractor vanished into a pancake. The water tower cracked and its shreds hit the ground white its wheel was still describing a long curve through the air, as if of its own leisurely volition. The steel beams and girders of the solid new trestle collapsed like a structure of matchsticks under the breath of a sigh. It was so swift, so uncontested, so simple, that Dr. Stadler felt no horror, he felt nothing, it was not the reality he had known, it was the realm of a child’s nightmare where material objects could be dissolved by means of a single malevolent wish.

He moved the field glasses from his eyes. He was looking at an empty prairie. There was no farm, there was nothing in the distance except a darkish strip that looked like the shadow of a cloud.

A single, high, thin scream rose from the tiers behind him, as some woman fainted. He wondered why she should scream so long after the fact—and then he realized that the time elapsed since the touch of the first lever was not a full minute.

He raised his field glasses again, almost as if he were suddenly hoping that the cloud shadow would be all he would see. But the material objects were still there; they were a mount of refuse. He moved his glasses over the wreckage; in a moment, he realized that he was looking for the kid. He could not find it; there was nothing but a pile of gray fur.

When he lowered the glasses and turned, he found Dr. Ferris looking at him. He felt certain that through the whole of the test, it was not the target, it was his face that Ferris had watched, as if to see whether he, Robert Stadler, could withstand the ray.

“That’s all there is to it,” the fattish Dr. Blodgett announced through the microphone, in the ingratiating sales tone of a department-store floorwalker. “There is no nail or rivet remaining in the frame of the structures and there is no blood vessel left unbroken in the bodies of the animals.”

The crowd was rustling with jerky movements and high-pitched whispers. People were looking at one another, rising uncertainly and dropping down again, restlessly demanding anything but this pause. There was a sound of submerged hysteria in the whispers. They seemed to be waiting to be told what to think.

Dr. Stadler saw a woman being escorted down the steps from the back row, her head bent, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth: she was sick at her stomach.

He turned away and saw that Dr. Ferris was still watching him. Dr. Stadler leaned back a little, his face austere and scornful, the face of the nation’s greatest scientist, and asked, “Who invented that ghastly thing?”

“You did.”

Dr. Stadler looked at him, not moving.

“It is merely a practical appliance,” said Dr. Ferris pleasantly, “based upon your theoretical discoveries. It was derived from your invaluable research into the nature of cosmic rays and of the spatial transmission of energy.”

“Who worked on the Project?”

“A few third-raters, as you would call them. Really, there was very little difficulty. None of them could have begun to conceive of the first step toward the concept of your energy-transmission formula, but given that—the rest was easy.”

“What is the practical purpose of this invention? What are the ‘epoch-making possibilities’?”

“Oh, but don’t you see? It is an invaluable instrument of public security. No enemy would attack the possessor of such a weapon. It will set the country free from the fear of aggression and permit it to plan its future in undisturbed safety.” His voice had an odd carelessness, a tone of offhand improvisation, as if he were neither expecting nor attempting to be believed. “It will relieve social frictions. It will promote peace, stability and—as we have indicated—harmony. It will eliminate all danger of war.”

“What war? What aggression? With the whole world starving and all those People’s States barely subsisting on handouts from this country—where do you see any danger of war? Do you expect those ragged savages to attack you?”

Dr. Ferris looked straight into his eyes. “Internal enemies can be as great a danger to the people as external ones,” he answered. “Perhaps greater.” This time his voice sounded as if he expected and was certain to be understood. “Social systems are so precarious. But think of what stability could be achieved by a few scientific installations at strategic key points. It would guarantee a state of permanent peace—don’t you think so?”

Dr. Stadler did not move or answer; as the seconds clicked past and his face still held an unchanged expression, it began to look paralyzed.

His eyes had the stare of a man who suddenly sees that which he had known, had known from the first, had spent years trying not to see, and who is now engaged in a contest between the sight and his power to deny its existence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he snapped at last.

Dr. Ferris smiled. “No private businessman or greedy industrialist would have financed Project X,” he said softly, in the tone of an idle, informal discussion. “He couldn’t have afforded it. It’s an enormous investment, with no prospect of material gain. What profit could he expect from it? There are no profits henceforth to be derived from that farm.” He pointed at the dark strip in the distance. “But, as you have so well observed, Project X had to be a non-profit venture. Contrary to a business firm, the State Science Institute had no trouble in obtaining funds for the Project. You have not heard of the Institute having any financial difficulties in the past two years, have you? And it used to be such a problem—getting them to vote the funds necessary for the advancement of science. They always demanded gadgets for their cash, as you used to say. Well, here was a gadget which some people in power could fully appreciate. They got the others to vote for it. It wasn’t difficult. In fact, a great many of those others felt safe in voting money for a project that was secret—they felt certain it was important, since they were not considered important enough to be let in on it.

There were, of course, a few skeptics and doubters. But they gave in when they were reminded that the head of the State Science Institute was Dr. Robert Stadler—whose judgment and integrity they could not doubt.”

Dr. Stadler was looking down at his fingernails.

The sudden screech of the microphone jerked the crowd into an instantaneous attentiveness; people seemed to be a second’s worth of self-control away from panic. An announcer, with a voice like a machine gun spitting smiles, barked cheerily that they were now to witness the radio broadcast that would break the news of the great discovery to the whole nation. Then, with a glance at his watch, his script and the signaling arm of Wesley Mouch, he yelled into the sparkling snake-head of the microphone—into the living rooms, the offices, the studies, the nurseries of the country: “Ladies and gentlemen! Project X!”

Dr. Ferris leaned toward Dr. Stadler—through the staccato hoof beats of the announcer’s voice galloping across the continent with a description of the new invention—and said in the tone of a casual remark, “It is vitally important that there be no criticism of the Project in the country at this precarious time,” then added semi-accidentally, as a semi-joke, “that there be no criticism of anything at any time.”

“—and the nation’s political, cultural, intellectual and moral leaders,” the announcer was yelling into the microphone, “who have witnessed this great event, as your representatives and in your name, will now tell you their views of it in person!”

Mr. Thompson was the first to mount the wooden steps to the platform of the microphone. He snapped his way through a brief speech, hailing a new era and declaring—in the belligerent tone of a challenge to unidentified enemies—that science belonged to the people and that every man on the face of the globe had a right to a share of the advantages created by technological progress.

Wesley Mouch came next. He spoke about social planning and the necessity of unanimous rallying in support of the planners. He spoke about discipline, unity, austerity and the patriotic duty of bearing temporary hardships. “We have mobilized the best brains of the country to work for your welfare. This great invention was the product of the genius of a man whose devotion to the cause of humanity is not to be questioned, a man acknowledged by all as the greatest mind of the century—Dr. Robert Stadler!”

“What?” gasped Dr. Stadler, whirling toward Ferris.

Dr. Ferris looked at him with a glance of patient mildness.

“He didn’t ask my permission to say that!” Dr. Stadler half-snapped, half-whispered.

Dr. Ferris spread out his hands in a gesture of reproachful helplessness. “Now you see, Dr. Stadler, how unfortunate it is if you allow yourself to be disturbed by political matters, which you have always considered unworthy of your attention and knowledge. You see, it is not Mr. Mouch’s function to ask permissions.”

The figure now slouching against the sky on the speakers platform, coiling itself about the microphone, talking in the bored, contemptuous tone of an off-color story, was Dr. Simon Pritchett. He was declaring that the new invention was an instrument of social welfare, which guaranteed general prosperity, and that anyone who doubted this self evident fact was an enemy of society, to be treated accordingly.

“This invention, the product of Dr. Robert Stadler, the pre-eminent lover of freedom—”

Dr. Ferris opened a briefcase, produced some pages of neatly typed copy and turned to Dr. Stadler. “You are to be the climax of the broadcast,” he said. “You will speak last, at the end of the hour.” He extended the pages. “Here’s the speech you’ll make.” His eyes said the rest: they said that his choice of words had not been accidental.

Dr. Stadler took the pages, but held them between the tips of two straight fingers, as one might hold a scrap of waste paper about to be tossed aside. “I haven’t asked you to appoint yourself as my ghost writer,” he said. The sarcasm of the voice gave Ferris his clue: this was not a moment for sarcasm.

“I couldn’t have allowed your invaluable time to be taken up by the writing of radio speeches,” said Dr. Ferris. “I felt certain that you would appreciate it.” He said it in a tone of spurious politeness intended to be recognized as spurious, the tone of tossing to a beggar the alms of face-saving.

Dr. Stadler’s answer disturbed him: Dr. Stadler did not choose to answer or to glance down at the manuscript.

“Lack of faith,” a beefy speaker was snarling on the platform, in the tone of a street brawl, “lack of faith is the only thing we got to fear! If we have faith in the plans of our leaders, why, the plans will work and we’ll all have prosperity and ease and plenty. It’s the fellows who go around doubting and destroying our morale, it’s they who’re keeping us in shortages and misery. But we’re not going to let them do it much longer, we’re here to protect the people—and if any of those doubting smarties come around, believe you me, we’ll take care of them!”

“It would be unfortunate,” said Dr. Ferris in a soft voice, “to arouse popular resentment against the State Science Institute at an explosive time like the present. There’s a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest in the country—and if people should misunderstand the nature of the new invention, they’re liable to vent their rage on all scientists. Scientists have never been popular with the masses.”

“Peace,” a tall, willowy woman was signing into the microphone, “this invention is a great, new instrument of peace. It will protect us from the aggressive designs of selfish enemies, it will allow us to breathe freely and to learn to love our fellow men.” She had a bony face with a mouth embittered at cocktail parties, and wore a flowing pale blue gown, suggesting the concert garment of a harpist. “It may well be considered as that miracle which was thought impossible in history—the dream of the ages—the final synthesis of science and love!”

Dr. Stadler looked at the faces in the grandstands. They were sitting quietly now, they were listening, but their eyes had an ebbing look of twilight, a look of fear in the process of being accepted as permanent, the look of raw wounds being dimmed by the veil of infection. They knew, as he knew it, that they were the targets of the shapeless funnels protruding from the mushroom building’s dome—and he wondered in what manner they were now extinguishing their minds and escaping that knowledge; he knew that the words they were eager to absorb and believe were the chains slipping in to hold them, like the goats, securely within the range of those funnels. They were eager to believe; he saw the tightening lines of their lips, he saw the occasional glances of suspicion they threw at their neighbors—as if the horror that threatened them was not the sound ray, but the men who would make them acknowledge it as horror. Their eyes were veiling over, but the remnant look of a wound was a cry for help.

“Why do you think they think?” said Dr. Ferris softly. “Reason is the scientist’s only weapon—and reason has no power over men, has it? At a time like ours, with the country falling apart, with the mob driven by blind desperation to the edge of open riots and violence—order must be maintained by any means available. What can we do when we have to deal with people?”

Dr. Stadler did not answer.

A fat, jellied woman, with an inadequate brassiere under a dark, perspiration-stained dress, was saying into the microphone—Dr. Stadler could not believe it at first—that the new invention was to be greeted with particular gratitude by the mothers of the country.

Dr. Stadler turned away; watching him, Ferris could see nothing but the noble line of the high forehead and the deep cut of bitterness at the corner of the mouth.

Suddenly, without context or warning, Robert Stadler whirled to face him. It was like a spurt of blood from a sudden crack in a wound that had almost closed: Stadler’s face was open, open in pain, in horror, in sincerity, as if, for that moment, both he and Ferris were human beings, while he moaned with incredulous despair: “In a civilized century, Ferris, in a civilized century!”

Dr. Ferris took his time to produce and prolong a soft chuckle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered in the tone of a quotation.

Dr. Stadler lowered his eyes.

When Ferris spoke again, his voice had the faintest edge of a tone which Stadler could not define, except that it did not belong in any civilized discussion: “It would be unfortunate if anything were to happen to jeopardize the State Science Institute. It would be most unfortunate if the Institute were to be closed—or if any one of us were to be forced to leave it. Where would we go? Scientists are an inordinate luxury these days—and there aren’t many people or establishments left who’re able to afford necessities, let alone luxuries. There are no doors left open to us. We wouldn’t be welcome in the research department of an industrial concern, such as—let us say—Rearden Steel. Besides, if we should happen to make enemies, the same enemies would be feared by any person tempted to employ our talents. A man like Rearden would have fought for us. Would a man like Orren Boyle? But this is purely theoretical speculation, because, as a matter of practical fact, all private establishments of scientific research have been closed by law—by Directive 10-289, issued, as you might not realize, by Mr. Wesley Mouch. Are you thinking, perhaps, of universities? They are in the same position. They can’t afford to make enemies. Who would speak up for us? I believe that some such man as Hugh Akston would have come to our defense—but to think of that is to be guilty of an anachronism. He belonged to a different age. The conditions set up in our social and economic reality have long since made his continued existence impossible. And I don’t think that Dr. Simon Pritchett, or the generation reared under his guidance, would be able or willing to defend us. I have never believed in the efficacy of idealists—have you?—and this is no age for impractical idealism. If anyone wished to oppose a government policy, how would he make himself heard? Through these gentlemen of the press, Dr. Stadler? Through this microphone? Is there an independent newspaper left in the country? An uncontrolled radio station? A private piece of property, for that matter—or a personal opinion?” The tone of the voice was obvious now: it was the tone of a thug. “A personal opinion is the one luxury that nobody can afford today.”

Dr. Stadler’s lips moved stiffly, as stiffly as the muscles of the goats, “You are speaking to Robert Stadler.”

“I have not forgotten that. It is precisely because I have not forgotten it that I am speaking, ‘Robert Stadler’ is an illustrious name, which I would hate to see destroyed. But what is an illustrious name nowadays? In whose eyes?” His arm swept over the grandstands. “In the eyes of people such as you see around you? If they will believe, when so told, that an instrument of death is a tool of prosperity—would they not believe it if they were told that Robert Stadler is a traitor and an enemy of the State? Would you then rely on the fact that this is not true? Are you thinking of truth, Dr. Stadler? Questions of truth do not enter into social issues. Principles have no influence on public affairs.

Reason has no power over human beings. Logic is impotent. Morality is superfluous. Do not answer me now, Dr. Stadler. You will answer me over the microphone. You’re the next speaker.”

Looking off at the dark strip of the farm in the distance, Dr. Stadler knew that what he felt was terror, but he would not permit himself to know its nature. He, who had been able to study the particles and sub particles of cosmic space, would not permit himself to examine his feeling and to know that it was made of three parts: one part was terror of a vision that seemed to stand before his eyes, the vision of the inscription cut, in his honor, over the door of the Institute: “To the fearless mind, to the inviolate truth”—another part was a plain, brute, animal fear of physical destruction, a humiliating fear which, in the civilized world of his youth, he had not expected ever to experience—and the third was the terror of the knowledge that by betraying the first, one delivers oneself into the realm of the second.

He walked toward the speaker’s scaffold, his steps firm and slow, his head lifted, the manuscript of the speech held crumpled in his fingers.

It looked like a walk to mount either a pedestal or a guillotine. As the whole of a man’s life flashes before him in his dying moment, so he walked to the sound of the announcer’s voice reading to the country the list of Robert Stadler’s achievements and career. A faint convulsion ran over Robert Stadler’s face at the words: “—former head of the Department of Physics of the Patrick Henry University.” He knew, distantly, not as if the knowledge were within him, but as if it were within some person he was leaving behind, that the crowd was about to witness an act of destruction more terrible than the destruction of the farm.

He had mounted the first three steps of the scaffold, when a young newsman tore forward, ran to him and, from below, seized the railing to stop him. “Dr. Stadler!” he cried in a desperate whisper. “Tell them the truth! Tell them that you had nothing to do with it! Tell them what sort of infernal machine it is and for what purpose it’s intended to be used! Tell the country what sort of people are trying to rule it! Nobody can doubt your word! Tell them the truth! Save us! You’re the only one who can!”

Dr. Stadler looked down at him. He was young; his movements and voice had that swift, sharp clarity which belongs to competence; among his aged, corrupt, favor-ridden and pull-created colleagues, he had managed to achieve the rank of elite of the political press, by means and in the role of a last, irresistible spark of ability. His eyes had the look of an eager, unfrightened intelligence; they were the kind of eyes Dr. Stadler had seen looking up at him from the benches of classrooms.

He noticed that this boy’s eyes were hazel; they had a tinge of green.

Dr. Stadler turned his head and saw that Ferris had come rushing to his side, like a servant or a jailer. “I do not expect to be insulted by disloyal young punks with treasonable motives,” said Dr. Stadler loudly.

Dr. Ferris whirled upon the young man and snapped, his face out of control, distorted by rage at the unexpected and unplanned, “Give me your press card and your work permit!”

“I am proud,” Dr. Robert Stadler read into the microphone and into the attentive silence of a nation, “that my years of work in the service of science have brought me the honor of placing into the hands of our great leader, Mr. Thompson, a new instrument with an incalculable potential for a civilizing and liberating influence upon the mind of man...”

The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust. Dagny stood on a street corner, where the airport bus had left her, looking at the city in passive astonishment. The buildings seemed worn by weeks of summer heat, but the people seemed worn by centuries of anguish. She stood watching them, disarmed by an enormous sense of unreality.

That sense of unreality had been her only feeling since the early hours of the morning—since the moment when, at the end of an empty highway, she had walked into an unknown town and stopped the first passer-by to ask where she was.

“Watsonville,” he answered. “What state, please?” she asked. The man glanced at her, said, “Nebraska,” and walked hastily away. She smiled mirthlessly, knowing that he wondered where she had come from and that no explanation he could imagine would be as fantastic as the truth. Yet it was Watsonville that seemed fantastic to her, as she walked through its streets to the railroad station. She had lost the habit of observing despair as the normal and dominant aspect of human existence, so normal as to become unnoticed—and the sight of it struck her in all of its senseless futility. She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it—they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden—yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it. She was seeing it so clearly that she kept wanting to approach strangers, to shake them, to laugh in their faces and to cry, “Snap out of it!”

There was no reason for people to be as unhappy as that, she thought, no reason whatever... and then she remembered that reason was the one power they had banished from their existence.

She boarded a Taggart train for the nearest airfield; she did not identify herself to anyone: it seemed irrelevant. She sat at the window of a coach, like a stranger who has to learn the incomprehensible language of those around her. She picked up a discarded newspaper; she managed, with effort, to understand what was written, but not why it should ever have been written: it all seemed so childishly senseless.

She stared in astonishment at a paragraph in a syndicated column from New York, which stated over emphatically that Mr. James Taggart wished it to be known that his sister had died in an airplane crash, any unpatriotic rumors to the contrary notwithstanding. Slowly, she remembered Directive 10-289 and realized that Jim was embarrassed by the public suspicion that she had vanished as a deserter.

The wording of the paragraph suggested that her disappearance had been a prominent public issue, not yet dropped. There were other suggestions of it: a mention of Miss Taggart’s tragic death, in a story about the growing number of plane crashes—and, on the back page, an ad, offering a $100,000 reward to the person who would find the wreckage of her plane, signed by Henry Rearden.

The last gave her a stab of urgency; the rest seemed meaningless.

Then, slowly, she realized that her return was a public event which would be taken as big news. She felt a lethargic weariness at the prospect of a dramatic homecoming, of facing Jim and the press, of witnessing the excitement. She wished they would get it over with in her absence.

At the airfield, she saw a small-town reporter interviewing some departing officials. She waited till he had finished, then she approached him, extended her credentials and said quietly, to the gaping stare of his eyes, “I’m Dagny Taggart. Would you make it known, please, that I’m alive and that I’ll be in New York this afternoon?” The plane was about to take off and she escaped the necessity of answering questions.

She watched the prairies, the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below—and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. The passengers were listening to some radio broadcast, which appeared to be important, judging by their earnest attentiveness. She caught brief snatches of fraudulent voices talking about some sort of new invention that was to bring some undefined benefits to some undefined public’s welfare. The words were obviously chosen to convey no specific meaning whatever; she wondered how one could pretend that one was hearing a speech; yet that was what the passengers were doing.

They were going through the performance of a child who, not yet able to read, holds a book open and spells out anything he wishes to spell, pretending that it is contained in the incomprehensible black lines. But the child, she thought, knows that he is playing a game; these people pretend to themselves that they are not pretending; they know no other state of existence.

The sense of unreality remained as her only feeling, when she landed, when she escaped a crowd of reporters without being seen—by avoiding the taxi stands and leaping into the airport bus—when she rode on the bus, then stood on a street corner, looking et New York, She felt as if she were seeing an abandoned city.

She felt no sense of homecoming, when she entered her apartment; the place seemed to be a convenient machine that she could use for some purpose of no significance whatever.

But she felt a quickened touch of energy, like the first break in a fog—a touch of meaning—when she picked up the telephone receiver and called Rearden’s office in Pennsylvania. “Oh, Miss Taggart... Miss Taggart!” said, in a joyous moan, the voice of the severe, unemotional Miss Ives.

“Hello, Miss Ives. I haven’t startled you, have I? You knew that I was alive?”

“Oh yes! I heard it on the radio this morning.”

“Is Mr. Rearden in his office?”

“No, Miss Taggart. He... he’s in the Rocky Mountains, searching for... that is...”

“Yes, I know. Do you know where we can reach him?”

“I expect to hear from him at any moment. He’s stopping in Los Gatos, Colorado, right now. I phoned him, the moment I heard the news, but he was out and I left a message for him to call me. You see, he’s out flying, most of the day... but he’ll call me when he comes back to the hotel.”

“What hotel is it?”

“The Eldorado Hotel, in Los Gatos.”

“Thank you, Miss Ives.” She was about to hang up.

“Oh, Miss Taggart!”

“Yes?”

“What was it that happened to you? Where were you?”

“I... I’ll tell you when I see you. I’m in New York now. When Mr. Rearden calls, tell him please that I’ll be in my office.”

“Yes, Miss Taggart.”

She hung up, but her hand remained on the receiver, clinging to her first contact with a matter that had importance. She looked at her apartment and at the city in the window, feeling reluctant to sink again into the dead fog of the meaningless.

She raised the receiver and called Los Gatos.

“Eldorado Hotel,” said a woman’s drowsily resentful voice.

“Would you take a message for Mr. Henry Rearden? Ash him, when he comes in, to—”

“Just a minute, please,” drawled the voice, in the impatient tone that resents any effort as an imposition.

She heard the clicking of switches, some buzzing, some breaks of silence and then a man’s clear, firm voice answering: “Hello?” It was Hank Rearden.

She stared at the receiver as at the muzzle of a gun, feeling trapped, unable to breathe.

“Hello?” he repeated.

“Hank, is that you?”

She heard a low sound, more a sigh than a gasp, and then the long, empty crackling of the wire.

“Hank’” There was no answer. “Hank!” she screamed in terror.

She thought she heard the effort of a breath—then she heard a whisper, which was not a question, but a statement saying everything: “Dagny.”

“Hank, I’m sorry—oh, darling, I’m sorry!—didn’t you know?”

“Where are you, Dagny?”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

“Didn’t you know that I was back and... and alive?”

“No... I didn’t know it.”

“Oh God, I’m sorry I called, I—”

“What are you talking about? Dagny, where are you?”

“In New York. Didn’t you hear about it on the radio?”

“No. I’ve just come in.”

“Didn’t they give you a message to call Miss Ives?”

“No.”

“Are you all right?”

“Now?” She heard his soft, low chuckle. She was hearing the sound of unreleased laughter, the sound of youth, growing in his voice with every word. “When did you come back?”

“This morning.”

“Dagny, where were you?”

She did not answer at once. “My plane crashed,” she said. “In the Rockies. I was picked up by some people who helped me, but I could not send word to anyone.”

The laughter went out of his voice. “As bad as that?”

“Oh... oh, the crash? No, it wasn’t bad. I wasn’t hurt. Not seriously.”

“Then why couldn’t you send word?”

“There were no... no means of communication.”

“Why did it take you so long to get back?”

“I... can’t answer that now.”

“Dagny, were you in danger?”

The half-smiling, half-bitter tone of her voice was almost regret, as she answered, “No.”

“Were you held prisoner?”

“No—not really.”

“Then you could have returned sooner, but didn’t?”

“That’s true—but that’s all I can tell you.”

“Where were you, Dagny?”

“Do you mind if we don’t talk about it now? Let’s wait until I see you.”

“Of course. I won’t ask any questions. Just tell me: are you safe now?”

“Safe? Yes.”

“I mean, have you suffered any permanent injuries or consequences?”

She answered, with the same sound of a cheerless smile, “Injuries—no, Hank. I don’t know, as to the permanent consequences.”

“Will you still be in New York tonight?”

“Why, yes. I’m... I’m back for good.”

“Are you?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m too used to what it’s like when... when I can’t find you.”

“I’m back.”

“Yes. I’ll see you in a few hours.” His voice broke off, as if the sentence were too enormous to believe. “In a few hours,” he repeated firmly.

“I’ll be here.”

“Dagny—”

“Yes?”

He chuckled softly. “No, nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice awhile longer. Forgive me. I mean, not now. I mean, I don’t want to say anything now.”

“Hank, I—”

“When I see you, my darling. So long.”

She stood looking at the silent receiver. For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her alive, because it was worth feeling.

She telephoned her secretary at Taggart Transcontinental, to say briefly that she would be in the office in half an hour.

The statue of Nathaniel Taggart was real—when she stood facing it in the concourse of the Terminal. It seemed to her that they were alone in a vast, echoing temple, with fog coils of formless ghosts weaving and vanishing around them. She stood still, looking up at the statue, as for a brief moment of dedication. I’m back—were the only words she had to offer.

“Dagny Taggart” was still the inscription on the frosted glass panel of the door to her office. The look on the faces of her staff, as she entered the anteroom, was the look of drowning persons at the sight of a lifeline. She saw Eddie Willers standing at his desk in his glass enclosure, with some man before him. Eddie made a move in her direction, but stopped; he looked imprisoned. She let her glance greet every face in turn, smiling at them gently as at doomed children, then walked toward Eddie’s desk.

Eddie was watching her approach as if he were seeing nothing else in the world, but his rigid posture seemed designed to pretend that he was listening to the man before him.

“Motive power?” the man was saying in a voice that had a brusque, staccato snap and a slurred, nasal drawl, together. “There’s no problem about motive power. You just take—”

“Hello,” said Eddie softly, with a muted smile, as to a distant vision.

The man turned to glance at her. He had a yellow complexion, curly hair, a hard face made of soft muscles, and the revolting handsomeness belonging to the esthetic standards of barroom corners; his blurred brown eyes had the empty flatness of glass.

“Miss Taggart,” said Eddie, in a resonant tone of severity, the tone of slapping the man into the manners of a drawing room he had never entered, “may I present Mr. Meigs?”

“How d’ do,” said the man without interest, then turned to Eddie and proceeded, as if she were not present: “You just take the Comet off the schedule for tomorrow and Tuesday, and shoot the engines to Arizona for the grapefruit special, with the rolling stock from the Scranton coal run I mentioned. Send the orders out at once.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind!” she gasped, too incredulous to be angry.

Eddie did not answer.

Meigs glanced at her with what would have been astonishment if his eyes were capable of registering a reaction. “Send the orders,” he said to Eddie, with no emphasis, and walked out.

Eddie was jotting notations on a piece of paper.

“Are you crazy?” she asked.

He raised his eyes to her, as though exhausted by hours of beating.

“We’ll have to, Dagny,” he said, his voice dead.

“What is that?” she asked, pointing at the outer door that had closed on Mr. Meigs.

“The Director of Unification.”

“What?”

“The Washington representative, in charge of the Railroad Unification Plan.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s... Oh, wait, Dagny, are you all right? Were you hurt? Was it a plane crash?”

She had never imagined what the face of Eddie Willers would look like in the process of aging, but she was seeing it now—aging at thirty-five and within the span of one month. It was not a matter of texture or wrinkles, it was the same face with the same muscles, but saturated by the withering look of resignation to a pain accepted as hopeless.

She smiled, gently and confidently, in understanding, in dismissal of all problems, and said, extending her hand, “All right, Eddie. Hello.”

He took her hand and pressed it to his lips, a thing he had never done before, his manner neither daring nor apologetic, but simply and openly personal.

“It was a plane crash,” she said, “and, Eddie, so that you won’t worry, I’ll tell you the truth: I wasn’t hurt, not seriously. But that’s not the story I’m going to give to the press and to all the others. So you’re never to mention it.”

“Of course.”

“I had no way to communicate with anyone, but not because I was hurt. It’s all I can tell you, Eddie. Don’t ask me where I was or why it took me so long to return.”

“I won’t.”

“Now tell me, what is the Railroad Unification Plan?”

“It’s... Oh, do you mind?—let Jim tell you. He will, soon enough. I just don’t have the stomach—unless you want me to,” he added, with a conscientious effort at discipline.

“No, you don’t have to. Just tell me whether I understood that Unificator correctly: he wants you to cancel the Comet for two days in order to give her engines to a grapefruit special in Arizona?”

“That’s right.”

“And he’s cancelled a coal train in order to get cars to lug grapefruit?”

“Yes.”

“Grapefruit?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Dagny, ‘why’ is a word nobody uses any longer.”

After a moment, she asked, “Have you any guess about the reason?”

“Guess? I don’t have to guess. I know.”

“All right, what is it?”

“The grapefruit special is for the Smather brothers. The Smather brothers bought a fruit ranch in Arizona a year ago, from a man who went bankrupt under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill. He had owned the ranch for thirty years. The Smather brothers were in the punchboard business the year before. They bought the ranch by means of a loan from Washington under a project for the reclamation of distressed areas, such as Arizona. The Smather brothers have friends in Washington.”

“Well?”

“Dagny, everybody knows it. Everybody knows how train schedules have been run in the past three weeks, and why some districts and some shippers get transportation, while others don’t. What we’re not supposed to do is say that we know it. We’re supposed to pretend to believe that public welfare is the only reason for any decision—and that the public welfare of the city of New York requires the immediate delivery of a large quantity of grapefruit.” He paused, then added, “The Director of Unification is sole judge of the public welfare and has sole authority over the allocation of any motive power and rolling stock on any railroad anywhere in the United States.”

There was a moment of silence. “I see,” she said. In another moment, she asked, “What has been done about the Winston tunnel?”

“Oh, that was abandoned three weeks ago. They never unearthed the trains. The equipment gave out.”

“What has been done about rebuilding the old line around the tunnel?”

“That was shelved.”

“Then are we running any transcontinental traffic?”

He gave her an odd glance. “Oh yes,” he said bitterly.

“Through the detour of the Kansas Western?”

“No.”

“Eddie, what has been happening here in the past month?”

He smiled as if his words were an ugly confession. “We’ve been making money in the past month,” he answered.

She saw the outer door open and James Taggart come in, accompanied by Mr. Meigs. “Eddie, do you want to be present at the conference?” she asked. “Or would you rather miss this one?”

“No. I want to be present.”

Jim’s face looked like a crumpled piece of paper, though its soft, puffed flesh had acquired no additional lines.

“Dagny, there’s a lot of things to discuss, a lot of important changes which—” he said shrilly, his voice rushing in ahead of his person. “Oh, I’m glad to see you back, I’m happy that you’re alive,” he added impatiently, remembering. “Now there are some urgent—”

“Let’s go to my office,” she said.

Her office was like a historical reconstruction, restored and maintained by Eddie Willers. Her map, her calendar, the picture of Nat Taggart were on the walls, and no trace was left of the Clifton Locey era.

“I understand that I am still the Operating Vice-President of this railroad?” she asked, sitting down at her desk.

“You are,” said Taggart hastily, accusingly, almost defiantly. “You certainly are—and don’t you forget it—you haven’t quit, you’re still—have you?”

“No, I haven’t quit.”

“Now the most urgent thing to do is to tell that to the press, tell them that you’re back on the job and where you were and—and, by the way, where were you?”

“Eddie,” she said, “will you make a note on this and send it to the press? My plane developed engine trouble while I was flying over the Rocky Mountains to the Taggart Tunnel. I lost my way, looking for an emergency landing, and crashed in an uninhabited mountain section—of Wyoming. I was found by an old sheepherder and his wife, who took me to their cabin, deep in the wilderness, fifty miles away from the nearest settlement. I was badly injured and remained unconscious for most of two weeks. The old couple had no telephone, no radio, no means of communication or transportation, except an old truck that broke down when they attempted to use it. I had to remain with them until I recovered sufficient strength to walk. I walked the fifty miles to the foothills, then hitchhiked my way to a Taggart station in Nebraska.”

“I see,” said Taggart. “Well, that’s fine. Now when you give the press interview—”

“I’m not going to give any press interviews.”

“What? But they’ve been calling me all day! They’re waiting! It’s essential!” He had an air of panic. “It’s most crucially essential!”

“Who’s been calling you all day?”

“People in Washington and... and others... They’re waiting for your statement.”

She pointed at Eddie’s notes. “There’s my statement.”

“But that’s not enough! You must say that you haven’t quit.”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m back.”

“You must say something about it.”

“Such as what?”

“Something personal.”

“To whom?”

“To the country. People were worried about you. You must reassure them.”

“The story will reassure them, if anyone was worried about me.”

“That’s not what I mean!”

“Well, what do you mean?”

“I mean—” He stopped, his eyes avoiding hers. “I mean—” He sat, searching for words, cracking his knuckles.

Jim was going to pieces, she thought; the jerky impatience, the shrillness, the aura of panic were new; crude outbreaks of a tone of ineffectual menace had replaced his pose of cautious smoothness.

“I mean—” He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood, “I mean, the public—”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “No, Jim, I’m not going to reassure the public about the state of our industry.”

“Now you’re—”

“The public had better be as unreassured as it has the wits to be. Now proceed to business.”

“I—”

“Proceed to business, Jim.”

He glanced at Mr. Meigs. Mr. Meigs sat silently, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He wore a jacket which was not, but looked like, a military uniform. The flesh of his neck bulged over the collar, and the flesh of his body strained against the narrow waistline intended to disguise it. He wore a ring with a large yellow diamond that flashed when he moved his stubby fingers.

“You’ve met Mr. Meigs,” said Taggart. “I’m so glad that the two of you will get along well together.” He made an expectant half-pause, but received no answer from either. “Mr. Meigs is the representative of the Railroad Unification Plan. You’ll have many opportunities to cooperate with him.”

“What is the Railroad Unification Plan?”

“It is a... a new national setup that went into effect three weeks ago, which you will appreciate and approve of and find extremely practical.” She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it. “It is an emergency setup which has saved the country’s transportation system.”

“What is the plan?”

“You realize, of course, the insurmountable difficulties of any sort of construction job during this period of emergency. It is—temporarily—impossible to lay new track. Therefore, the country’s top problem is to preserve the transportation industry as a whole, to preserve its existing plant and all of its existing facilities. The national survival requires—”

“What is the plan?”

“As a policy of national survival, the railroads of the country have been unified into a single team, pooling their resources. All of their gross revenue is turned over to the Railroad Pool Board in Washington, which acts as trustee for the industry as a whole, and divides the total income among the various railroads, according to a... a more modern principle of distribution.”

“What principle?”

“Now don’t worry, property rights have been fully preserved and protected, they’ve merely been given a new form. Every railroad retains independent responsibility for its own operations, its train schedules and the maintenance of its track and equipment. As its contribution to the national pool, every railroad permits any other, when conditions so require, to use its track and facilities without charge. At the end of the year, the Pool Board distributes the total gross income, and every individual railroad is paid, not on the haphazard, old-fashioned basis of the number of trains run or the tonnage of freight carried, but on the basis of its need—that is, the preservation of its track being its main need, every individual railroad is paid according to the mileage of the track which it owns and maintains.”

She heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real—to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people’s willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane. She felt a numbed emptiness—and the sense of being thrown far below the realm where moral indignation is pertinent.

“Whose track are we using for our transcontinental traffic?” she asked, her voice flat and dry.

“Why, our own, of course,” said Taggart hastily, “that is, from New York to Bedford, Illinois. We run our trains out of Bedford on the track of the Atlantic Southern.”

“To San Francisco?”

“Well, it’s much faster than that long detour you tried to establish.”

“We run our trains without charge for the use of the track?”

“Besides, your detour couldn’t have lasted, the Kansas Western rail was shot, and besides—”

“Without charge for the use of the Atlantic Southern track?”

“Well, we’re not charging them for the use of our Mississippi bridge, either.”

After a moment, she asked, “Have you looked at a map?”

“Sure,” said Meigs unexpectedly. “You own the largest track mileage of any railroad in the country. So you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Eddie Willers burst out laughing.

Meigs glanced at him blankly, “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Eddie wearily, “nothing.”

“Mr. Meigs,” she said, “if you look at a map, you will see that two thirds of the cost of maintaining a track for our transcontinental traffic is given to us free and is paid by our competitor.”

“Why, sure,” he said, but his eyes narrowed, watching her suspiciously, as if he were wondering what motive prompted her to so explicit a statement.

“While we’re paid for owning miles of useless track which carries no traffic,” she said.

Meigs understood—and leaned back as if he had lost all further interest in the discussion.

“That’s not true!” snapped Taggart. “We’re running a great number of local trains to serve the region of our former transcontinental line—through Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado—and, on the other side of the tunnel, through California, Nevada and Utah.”

“We’re running two locals a day,” said Eddie Willers, in the dry, blankly innocent tone of a business report. “Fewer, some places.”

“What determines the number of trains which any given railroad is obligated to run?” she asked.

“The public welfare,” said Taggart.

“The Pool Board,” said Eddie.

“How many trains have been discontinued in the country in the past three weeks?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Taggart eagerly, “the plan has helped to harmonize the industry and to eliminate cutthroat competition.”

“It has eliminated thirty per cent of the trains run in the country,” said Eddie. “The only competition left is in the applications to the Board for permission to cancel trains. The railroad to survive will be the one that manages to run no trains at all.”

“Has anybody calculated how long the Atlantic Southern is expected to be able to remain in business?”

“That’s no skin off your—” started Meigs.

“Please, Cuffy!” cried Taggart.

“The president of the Atlantic Southern,” said Eddie impassively, “has committed suicide.”

“That had nothing to do with this!” yelled Taggart. “It was over a personal matter!”

She remained silent. She sat, looking at their faces. There was still an element of wonder in the numbed indifference of her mind: Jim had always managed to switch the weight of his failures upon the strongest plants around him and to survive by destroying them to pay for his errors, as he had done with Dan Conway, as he had done with the industries of Colorado; but this did not have even the rationality of a looter—this pouncing upon the drained carcass of a weaker, a half bankrupt competitor for a moment’s delay, with nothing but a cracking bone between the pouncer and the abyss.

The impulse of the habit of reason almost pushed her to speak, to argue, to demonstrate the self-evident—but she looked at their faces and she saw that they knew it. In some terms different from hers, in some inconceivable manner of consciousness, they knew all that she could tell them, it was useless to prove to them the irrational horror of their course and of its consequences, both Meigs and Taggart knew it—and the secret of their consciousness was the means by which they escaped the finality of their knowledge. “I see,” she said quietly.

“Well, what would you rather have had me do?” screamed Taggart. “Give up our transcontinental traffic? Go bankrupt? Turn the railroad into a miserable East Coast local?” Her two words seemed to have hit him worse than any indignant objection; he seemed to be shaking with terror at that which the quiet “I see” had acknowledged seeing. “I couldn’t help it! We had to have a transcontinental track! There was no way to get around the tunnel! We had no money to pay for any extra costs! Something had to be done! We had to have a track!”

Meigs was looking at him with a glance of part astonishment, part disgust, “I am not arguing, Jim,” she said dryly.

“We couldn’t permit a railroad like Taggart Transcontinental to crash! It would have been a national catastrophe! We had to think of all the cities and industries and shippers and passengers and employees and stockholders whose lives depend on us! It wasn’t just for ourselves, it was for the public welfare! Everybody agrees that the Railroad Unification Plan is practical! The best-informed—”

“Jim,” she said, “if you have any further business to discuss with me—discuss it.”

“You’ve never considered the social angle of anything,” he said, in a sullen, retreating voice.

She noticed that this form of pretense was as unreal to Mr. Meigs as it was to her, though for an antipodal reason. He was looking at Jim with bored contempt. Jim appeared to her suddenly as a man who had tried to find a middle course between two poles—Meigs and herself—and who was now seeing that his course was narrowing and that he was to be ground between two straight walls.

“Mr. Meigs,” she asked, prompted by a touch of bitterly amused curiosity, “what is your economic plan for day after tomorrow?”

She saw his bleary brown eyes focus upon her without expression.

“You’re impractical,” he said.

“It’s perfectly useless to theorize about the future,” snapped Taggart, “when we have to take care of the emergency of the moment. In the long run—”

“In the long run, we’ll all be dead,” said Meigs.

Then, abruptly, he shot to his feet. “I’ll run along, Jim,” he said. “I’ve got no time to waste on conversations.” He added, “You talk to her about that matter of doing something to stop all those train wrecks—if she’s the little girl who’s such a wizard at railroading.” It was said inoffensively; he was a man who would not know when he was giving offense or taking it.

“I’ll see you later, Cuffy,” said Taggart, as Meigs walked out with no parting glance at any of them.

Taggart looked at her, expectantly and fearfully, as if dreading her comment, yet desperately hoping to hear some word, any word.

“Well?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Have you anything else to discuss?”

“Well, I...” He sounded disappointed. “Yes!” he cried, in the tone of a desperate plunge. “I have another matter to discuss, the most important one of all, the—”

“Your growing number of train wrecks?”

“No! Not that.”

“What, then?”

“It’s... that you’re going to appear on Bertram Scudder’s radio program tonight.”

She leaned back. “Am I?”

“Dagny, it’s imperative, it’s crucial, there’s nothing to be done about it, to refuse is out of the question, in times like these one has no choice, and—”

She glanced at her watch. “I’ll give you three minutes to explain—if you want to be heard at all. And you’d better speak straight.”

“All right!” he said desperately. “It’s considered most important—on the highest levels, I mean Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and Mr. Thompson, as high as that—that you should make a speech to the nation, a morale-building speech, you know, saying that you haven’t quit.”

“Why?”

“Because everybody thought you had!... You don’t know what’s been going on lately, but... but it’s sort of uncanny. The country is full of rumors, all sorts of rumors, about everything, all of them dangerous. Disruptive, I mean. People seem to do nothing but whisper. They don’t believe the newspapers, they don’t believe the best speakers, they believe every vicious, scare-mongering piece of gossip that comes floating around. There’s no confidence left, no faith, no order, no... no respect for authority. People... people seem to be on the verge of panic.”

“Well?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s that damnable business of all those big industrialists who’ve vanished into thin air! Nobody’s been able to explain it and it’s giving them the jitters. There’s all sorts of hysterical stuff being whispered about it, but what they whisper mostly is that ‘no decent man will work for those people.’ They mean the people in Washington. Now do you see? You wouldn’t suspect that you were so famous, but you are, or you’ve become, ever since your plane crash. Nobody believed the plane crash. They all thought you had broken the law, that is, Directive 10-289, and deserted. There’s a lot of popular... misunderstanding of Directive 10-289, a lot of... well, unrest.

Now you see how important it is that you go on the air and tell people that it isn’t true that Directive 10-289 is destroying industry, that it’s a sound piece of legislation devised for everybody’s good, and that if they’ll just be patient a little longer, things will improve and prosperity will return. They don’t believe any public official any more. You... you’re an industrialist, one of the few left of the old school, and the only one who’s ever come back after they thought you’d gone. You’re known as... as a reactionary who’s opposed to Washington policies. So the people will believe you. It would have a great influence on them, it would buttress their confidence, it would help their morale. Now do you see?”

He had rushed on, encouraged by the odd look of her face, a look of contemplation that was almost a faint half-smile.

She had listened, hearing, through his words, the sound of Rearden’s voice saying to her on a spring evening over a year ago: “They need some sort of sanction from us. I don’t know the nature of that sanction—but, Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don’t give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don’t give it to them.”

“Now do you see?”

“Oh yes, Jim, I see!”

He could not interpret the sound of her voice, it was low, it was part-moan, part-chuckle, part-triumph—but it was the first sound of emotion to come from her, and he plunged on, with no choice but to hope. “I promised them in Washington that you’d speak! We can’t fail them—not in an issue of this kind! We can’t afford to be suspected of disloyalty. It’s all arranged. You’ll be the guest speaker on Bertram Scudder’s program, tonight, at ten-thirty. He’s got a radio program where he interviews prominent public figures, it’s a national hookup, he has a large following, he reaches over twenty million people. The office of the Morale Conditioner has—”

“The what?”

“The Morale Conditioner—that’s Chick Morrison—has called me three times, to make sure that nothing would go wrong. They’ve issued orders to all the news broadcasters, who’ve been announcing it all day, all over the country, telling people to listen to you tonight on Bertram Scudder’s hour.”

He looked at her as if he were demanding both an answer and the recognition that her answer was the element of least importance in these circumstances. She said, “You know what I think of the Washington policies and of Directive 10-289.”

“At a time like this, we can’t afford the luxury of thinking!”

She laughed aloud.

“But don’t you see that you can’t refuse them now?” he yelled. “If you don’t appear after all those announcements, it will support the rumors, it will amount to an open declaration of disloyalty!”

“The trap won’t work, Jim.”

“What trap?”

“The one you’re always setting up.”

“I don’t know what you mean!”

“Yes, you do. You knew—all of you knew it—that I would refuse.

So you pushed me into a public trap, where my refusal would become an embarrassing scandal for you, more embarrassing than you thought I’d dare to cause. You were counting on me to save your faces and the necks you stuck out. I won’t save them.”

“But I promised it!”

“I didn’t.”

“But we can’t refuse them! Don’t you see that they’ve got us hogtied?

That they’re holding us by the throat? Don’t you know what they can do to us through this Railroad Pool, or through the Unification Board, or through the moratorium on our bonds?”

“I knew that two years ago.”

He was shaking; there was some formless, desperate, almost superstitious quality in his terror, out of proportion to the dangers he named.

She felt suddenly certain that it came from something deeper than his fear of bureaucratic reprisal, that the reprisal was the only identification of it which he would permit himself to know, a reassuring identification which had a semblance of rationality and hid his true motive. She felt certain that it was not the country’s panic he wanted to stave off, but his own—that he, and Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and all the rest of the looting crew needed her sanction, not to reassure their victims, but to reassure themselves, though the allegedly crafty, the allegedly practical idea of deluding their victims was the only identification they gave to their own motive and their hysterical insistence. With an awed contempt—awed by the enormity of the sight—she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.

“We have no choice!” he cried. “Nobody has any choice!”

“Get out of here,” she said, her voice very quiet and low.

Some tonal quality in the sound of her voice struck the note of the unconfessed within him, as if, never allowing it into words, he knew from what knowledge that sound had come. He got out.

She glanced at Eddie; he looked like a man worn by fighting one more of the attacks of disgust which he was learning to endure as a chronic condition.

After a moment, he asked, “Dagny, what became of Quentin Daniels?

You were flying after him, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s gone.”

“To the destroyer?”

The word hit her like a physical blow. It was the first touch of the outer world upon that radiant presence which she had kept within her all day, as a silent, changeless vision, a private vision, not to be affected by any of the things around her, not to be thought about, only to be felt as the source of her strength. The destroyer, she realized, was the name of that vision, here, in their world.

“Yes,” she said dully, with effort, “to the destroyer.”

Then she closed her hands over the edge of the desk, to steady her purpose and her posture, and said, with the bitter hint of a smile, “Well, Eddie, let’s see what two impractical persons, like you and me, can do about preventing the tram wrecks.”

It was two hours later—when she was alone at her desk, bent over sheets of paper that bore nothing but figures, yet were like a motion picture film unrolling to tell her the whole story of the railroad in the past four weeks—that the buzzer rang and her secretary’s voice said, “Mrs. Rearden to see you, Miss Taggart.”

“Mr. Rearden?” she asked incredulously, unable to believe either.

“No. Mrs. Rearden.”

She let a moment pass, then said, “Please ask her to come in.”

There was some peculiar touch of emphasis in Lillian Rearden’s bearing when she entered and walked toward the desk. She wore a tailored suit, with a loose, bright bow hanging casually sidewise for a note of elegant incongruity, and a small hat tilted at an angle considered smart by virtue of being considered amusing; her face was a shade too smooth, her steps a shade too slow, and she walked almost as if she were swinging her hips.

“How do you do, Miss Taggart,” she said in a lazily gracious voice, a drawing-room voice which seemed to strike, in that office, the same style of incongruity as her suit and her bow.

Dagny inclined her head gravely.

Lillian glanced about the office; her glance had the same style of amusement as her hat: an amusement purporting to express maturity by the conviction that life could be nothing but ridiculous.

“Please sit down,” said Dagny.

Lillian sat down, relaxing into a confident, gracefully casual posture.

When she turned her face to Dagny, the amusement was still there, but its shading was now different: it seemed to suggest that they shared a secret, which would make her presence here seem preposterous to the world, but self-evidently logical to the two of them. She stressed it by remaining silent.

“What can I do for you?”

“I came to tell you,” said Lillian pleasantly, “that you will appear on Bertram Scudder’s broadcast tonight.”

She detected no astonishment in Dagny’s face, no shock, only the glance of an engineer studying a motor that makes an irregular sound.

“I assume,” said Dagny, “that you are fully aware of the form of your sentence.”

“Oh yes!” said Lillian.

“Then proceed to support it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Proceed to tell me.”

Lillian gave a brief little laugh, its forced brevity betraying that this was not quite the attitude she had expected. “I am sure that no lengthy explanations will be necessary,” she said. “You know why your appearance on that broadcast is important to those in power. I know why you have refused to appear. I know your convictions on the subject.

You may have attached no importance to it, but you do know that my sympathy has always been on the side of the system now in power.

Therefore, you will understand my interest in the issue and my place in it. When your brother told me that you had refused, I decided to take a hand in the matter—because, you see, I am one of the very few who know that you are not in a position to refuse.”

“I am not one of those few, as yet,” said Dagny.

Lillian smiled. “Well, yes, I must explain a little further. You realize that your radio appearance will have the same value for those in power as—as the action of my husband when he signed the Gift Certificate that turned Rearden Metal over to them. You know how frequently and how usefully they have been mentioning it in all of their propaganda.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Dagny sharply.

“Oh, of course, you have been away for most of the last two months, so you might have missed the constant reminders—in the press, on the radio, in public speeches—that even Hank Rearden approves of and supports Directive 10-289, since he has voluntarily signed his Metal over to the nation. Even Hank Rearden. That discourages a great many recalcitrants and helps to keep them in line.” She leaned back and asked in the tone of a casual aside, “Have you ever asked him why he signed?”

Dagny did not answer; she did not seem to hear that it was a question; she sat still and her face was expressionless, but her eyes seemed too large and they were fixed on Lillian’s, as if she were now intent upon nothing but hearing Lillian to the end.

“No, I didn’t think you knew it. I didn’t think that he would ever tell you,” said Lillian, her voice smoother, as if recognizing the signposts and sliding comfortably down the anticipated course. “Yet you must learn the reason that made him sign—because it is the same reason that will make you appear on Bertram Scudder’s broadcast tonight.”

She paused, wishing to be urged; Dagny waited.

“It is a reason,” said Lillian, “which should please you—as far as my husband’s action is concerned. Consider what that signature meant to him. Rearden Metal was his greatest achievement, the summation of the best in his life, the final symbol of his pride—and my husband, as you have reason to know, is an extremely passionate man, his pride in himself being, perhaps, his greatest passion. Rearden Metal was more than an achievement to him, it was the symbol of his ability to achieve, of his independence, of his struggle, of his rise. It was his property, his by right—and you know what rights mean to a man as strict as he, and what property means to a man as possessive. He would have gladly died to defend it, rather than surrender it to the men he despised. This is what it meant to him—and this is what he gave up. You will be glad to know that he gave it up for your sake, Miss Taggart. For the sake of your reputation and your honor. He signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal—under the threat that the adultery he was carrying on with you would be exposed to the eyes of the world. Oh yes, we had full proof of it, in every intimate detail. I believe that you hold a philosophy which disapproves of sacrifice—but in this case, you are most certainly a woman, so I’m sure that you will feel gratification at the magnitude of the sacrifice a man has made for the privilege of using your body. You have undoubtedly taken great pleasure in the nights which he spent in your bed. You may now take pleasure in the knowledge of what those nights have cost him. And since—you like bluntness, don’t you, Miss Taggart?—since your chosen status is that of a whore, I take my hat off to you in regard to the price you exacted, which none of your sisters could ever have hoped to match.”

Lillian’s voice had kept growing reluctantly sharper, like a drill head that kept breaking by being unable to find the line of the fault in the stone. Dagny was still looking at her, but the intensity had vanished from Dagny’s eyes and posture. Lillian wondered why she felt as if Dagny’s face were hit by a spotlight. She could detect no particular expression, it was simply a face in natural repose—and the clarity seemed to come from its structure, from the precision of its sharp planes, the firmness of the mouth, the steadiness of the eyes. She could not decipher the expression of the eyes, it seemed incongruous, it resembled the calm, not of a woman, but of a scholar, it had that peculiar, luminous quality which is the fearlessness of satisfied knowledge.

“It was I,” said Lillian softly, “who informed the bureaucrats about my husband’s adultery.”

Dagny noticed the first flicker of feeling in Lillian’s lifeless eyes: it resembled pleasure, but so distantly that it looked like sunlight reflected from the dead surface of the moon to the stagnant water of a swamp; it flickered for an instant and went.

“It was I,” said Lillian, “who took Rearden Metal away from him.”

It sounded almost like a plea.

It was not within the power of Dagny’s consciousness ever to understand that plea or to know what response Lillian had hoped to find; she knew only that she had not found it, when she heard the sudden shrillness of Lillian’s voice: “Have you understood me?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know what I demand and why you’ll obey me. You thought you were invincible, you and he, didn’t you?” The voice was attempting smoothness, but it was jerking unevenly. “You have always acted on no will but your own—a luxury I have not been able to afford. For once and in compensation, I will see you acting on mine.

You can’t fight me. You can’t buy your way out of it, with those dollars which you’re able to make and I’m not. There’s no profit you can offer me—I’m devoid of greed. I’m not paid by the bureaucrats for doing this—I am doing it without gain. Without gain. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Then no further explanations are necessary, only the reminder that all the factual evidence—hotel registers, jewelry bills and stuff like that—is still in the possession of the right persons and will be broadcast on every radio program tomorrow, unless you appear on one radio program tonight. Is this clear?”

“Yes.”

“Now what is your answer?” She saw the luminous scholar-eyes looking at her, and suddenly she felt as if too much of her were seen and as if she were not seen at all.

“I am glad that you have told me,” said Dagny. “I will appear on Bertram Scudder’s broadcast tonight.”

There was a beam of white light beating down upon the glittering metal of a microphone—in the center of a glass cage imprisoning her with Bertram Scudder. The spark of glitter were greenish-blue; the microphone was made of Rearden Metal.

Above them, beyond a sheet of glass, she could distinguish a booth with two rows of faces looking down at her: the lax, anxious face of James Taggart, with Lillian Rearden beside him, her hand resting reassuringly on his arm—a man who had arrived by plane from Washington and had been introduced to her as Chick Morrison—and a group of young men from his staff, who talked about percentage curves of intellectual influence and acted like motorcycle cops.

Bertram Scudder seemed to be afraid of her. He clung to the microphone, spitting words into its delicate mesh, into the ears of the country, introducing the subject of his program. He was laboring to sound cynical, skeptical, superior and hysterical together, to sound like a man who sneers at the vanity of all human beliefs and thereby demands an instantaneous belief from his listeners. A small patch of moisture glistened on the back of his neck. He was describing in over colored detail her month of convalescence in the lonely cabin of a sheepherder, then her heroic trudging down fifty miles of mountain trails for the sake of resuming her duties to the people in this grave hour of national emergency.

“... And if any of you have been deceived by vicious rumors aimed to undermine your faith in the great social program of our leaders—you may trust the word of Miss Taggart, who—”

She stood, looking up at the white beam. Specks of dust were whirling in the beam and she noticed that one of them was alive: it was a gnat with a tiny sparkle in place of its beating wings, it was struggling for some frantic purpose of its own, and she watched it, feeling as distant from its purpose as from that of the world.

“... Miss Taggart is an impartial observer, a brilliant businesswoman who has often been critical of the government in the past and who may be said to represent the extreme, conservative viewpoint held by such giants of industry as Hank Rearden. Yet even she—”

She wondered at how easy it felt, when one did not have to feel; she seemed to be standing naked on public display, and a beam of light was enough to support her, because there was no weight of pain in her, no hope, no regret, no concern, no future.

“... And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will present to you the heroine of this night, our most uncommon guest, the—”

Pain came back to her in a sudden, piercing stab, like a long splinter from the glass of a protective wall shattered by the knowledge that the next words would be hers; it came back for the brief length of a name in her mind, the name of the man she had called the destroyer: she did not want him to hear what she would now have to say. If you hear it—the pain was like a voice crying it to him—you won’t believe the things I have said to you—no, worse, the things which I have not said, but which you knew and believed and accepted—you will think that I was not free to offer them and that my days with you were a lie—this will destroy my one month and ten of your years—this was not the way I wanted you to learn it, not like this, not tonight—but you will, you who’ve watched and known my every movement, you who’re watching me now, wherever you are—you will hear it—but it has to be said.

“—the last descendant of an illustrious name in our industrial history, the woman executive possible only in America, the Operating Vice-President of a great railroad—Miss Dagny Taggart!”

Then she felt the touch of Rearden Metal, as her hand closed over the stem of the microphone, and it was suddenly easy, not with the drugged ease of indifference, but with the bright, clear, living ease of action.

“I came here to tell you about the social program, the political system and the moral philosophy under which you are now living.”

There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.

“You have heard it said that I believe that this system has depravity as its motive, plunder as its goal, lies, fraud and force as its method, and destruction as its only result. You have also heard it said that, like Hank Rearden, I am a loyal supporter of this system and that I give my voluntary co-operation to present policies, such as Directive 10-289. I have come here to tell you the truth about it.

“It is true that I share the stand of Hank Rearden. His political convictions are mine. You have heard him denounced in the past as a reactionary who opposed every step, measure, slogan and premise of the present system. Now you hear him praised as our greatest industrialist, whose judgment on the value of economic policies may safely be trusted. It is true. You may trust his judgment. If you are now beginning to fear that you are in the power of an irresponsible evil, that the country is collapsing and that you will soon be left to starve—consider the views of our ablest industrialist, who knows what conditions are necessary to make production possible and to permit a country to survive.

Consider all that you know about his views. At such times as he was able to speak, you have heard him tell you that this government’s policies were leading you to enslavement and destruction. Yet he did not denounce the final climax of these policies—Directive 10-289. You have heard him fighting for his rights—his and yours—for his independence, for his property. Yet he did not fight Directive 10-289. He signed voluntarily, so you have been told, the Gift Certificate that surrendered Rearden Metal to his enemies. He signed the one paper which, by all of his previous record, you had expected him to fight to the death. What could this mean—you have constantly been told—unless it meant that even he recognized the necessity of Directive 10-289 and sacrificed his personal interests for the sake of the country?

Judge his views by the motive of that action, you have constantly been told. And with this I agree unreservedly: judge his views by the motive of that action. And—for whatever value you attach to my opinion and to any warning I may give you—judge my views also by the motive of that action, because his convictions are mine.

“For two years, I had been Hank Rearden’s mistress. Let there be no misunderstanding about it: I am saying this, not as a shameful confession, but with the highest sense of pride. I had been his mistress. I had slept with him, in his bed, in his arms. There is nothing anyone might now say to you about me, which I will not tell you first. It will be useless to defame me—I know the nature of the accusations and I will state them to you myself. Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have. If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes—let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine.”

Bertram Scudder was staring at her; this was not the speech he had expected and he felt, in dim panic, that it was not proper to let it continue, but she was the special guest whom the Washington rulers had ordered him to treat cautiously; he could not be certain whether he was now supposed to interrupt her or not; besides, he enjoyed hearing this sort of story. In the audience booth, James Taggart and Lillian Rearden sat frozen, like animals paralyzed by the headlight of a train rushing down upon them; they were the only ones present who knew the connection between the words they were hearing and the theme of the broadcast; it was too late for them to move; they dared not assume the responsibility of a movement or of whatever was to follow.

In the control room, a young intellectual of Chick Morrison’s staff stood ready to cut the broadcast off the air in case of trouble, but he saw no political significance in the speech he was hearing, no element he could construe as dangerous to his masters. He was accustomed to hearing speeches extorted by unknown pressure from unwilling victims, and he concluded that this was the case of a reactionary forced to confess a scandal and that, therefore, the speech had, perhaps, some political value; besides, he was curious to hear it.

“I am proud that he had chosen me to give him pleasure and that it was he who had been my choice. It was not—as it is for most of you—an act of casual indulgence and mutual contempt. It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice. We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values—those who make steel, railroads and happiness. And to such among you who hate the thought of human joy, who wish to see men’s life as chronic suffering and failure, who wish men to apologize for happiness—or for success, or ability, or achievement, or wealth—to such among you, I am now saying: I wanted him, I had him, I was happy, I had known joy, a pure, full, guiltless joy, the joy you dread to hear confessed by any human being, the joy of which your only knowledge is in your hatred for those who are worthy of reaching it. Well, hate me, then—because I reached it!”

“Miss Taggart,” said Bertram Scudder nervously, “aren’t we departing from the subject of... After all, your personal relationship with Mr. Rearden has no political significance which—”

“I didn’t think it had, either. And, of course, I came here to tell you about the political and moral system under which you are now living. Well, I thought that I knew everything about Hank Rearden, but there was one thing which I did not learn until today. It was the blackmail threat that our relationship would be made public that forced Hank Rearden to sign the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal. It was blackmail—blackmail by your government officials, by your rulers, by your—”

In the instant when Scudder’s hand swept out to knock the microphone over, a faint click came from its throat as it crashed to the floor, signifying that the intellectual cop had cut the broadcast off the air.

She laughed—but there was no one to see her and to hear the nature of her laughter. The figures rushing into the glass enclosure were screaming at one another. Chick Morrison was yelling unprintable curses at Bertram Scudder—Bertram Scudder was shouting that he had been opposed to the whole idea, but had been ordered to do it—James Taggart looked like an animal baring its teeth, while he snarled at two of Morrison’s youngest assistants and avoided the snarls of an older third. The muscles of Lillian Rearden’s face had an odd slackness, like the limbs of an animal lying in the road, intact but dead. The morale conditioners were shrieking what they guessed they thought Mr. Mouch would think. “What am I to say to them?” the program announcer was crying, pointing at the microphone. “Mr. Morrison, there’s an audience waiting, what am I to say?” Nobody answered him. They were not fighting over what to do, but over whom to blame.

Nobody said a word to Dagny or glanced in her direction. Nobody stopped her, when she walked out.

She stepped into the first taxicab in sight, giving the address of her apartment. As the cab started, she noticed that the dial of the radio on the driver’s panel was lighted and silent, crackling with the brief, tense coughs of static: it was tuned to Bertram Scudder’s program.

She lay back against the seat, feeling nothing but the desolation of the knowledge that the sweep of her action had, perhaps, swept away the man who might never wish to see her again. She felt, for the first time, the immensity of the hopelessness of finding him—if he did not choose to be found—in the streets of the city, in the towns of a continent, in the canyons of the Rocky Mountains where the goal was closed by a screen of rays. But one thing remained to her, like a log floating on a void, the log to which she had clung through the broadcast—and she knew that this was the thing she could not abandon, even were she to lose all the rest; it was the sound of his voice saying to her: “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice of Bertram Scudder’s announcer crackled suddenly out of the static, “due to technical difficulties over which we have no control, this station will remain off the air, pending the necessary readjustments.” The taxi driver gave a brief, contemptuous chuckle—and snapped the radio off.

When she stepped out and handed him a bill, he extended the change to her and, suddenly, leaned forward for a closer look at her face.

She felt certain that he recognized her and she held his glance austerely for an instant. His bitter face and his over patched shirt were worn out by a hopeless, losing struggle. As she handed him a tip, he said quietly, with too earnest, too solemn an emphasis for a mere acknowledgment of the corns, “Thank you, ma’am.”

She turned swiftly and hurried into the building, not to let him see the emotion which was suddenly more than she could bear.

Her head was drooping, as she unlocked the door of her apartment, and the light struck her from below, from the carpet, before she jerked her head up in astonishment at finding the apartment lighted. She took a step forward—and saw Hank Rearden standing across the room.

She was held still by two shocks: one was the sight of his presence, she had not expected him to be back so soon; the other was the sight of his face. His face had so firm, so confident, so mature a look of calm, in the faint half-smile, in the clarity of the eyes, that she felt as if he had aged decades within one month, but aged in the proper sense of human growth, aged in vision, in stature, in power. She felt that he who had lived through a month of agony, he whom she had hurt so deeply and was about to hurt more deeply still, he would now be the one to give her support and consolation, his would be the strength to protect them both. She stood motionless for only an instant, but she saw his smile deepening as if he were reading her thoughts and telling her that she had nothing to fear. She heard a slight, crackling sound and saw, on a table beside him, the lighted dial of a silent radio. Her eyes moved to his as a question and he answered by the faintest nod, barely more than a lowering of his eyelids; he had heard her broadcast.

They moved toward each other in the same moment. He seized her shoulders to support her, her face was raised to his, but he did not touch her lips, he took her hand and kissed her wrist, her fingers, her palm, as the sole form of the greeting which so much of his suffering had gone to await. And suddenly, broken by the whole of this day and of that month, she was sobbing in his arms, slumped against him, sobbing as she had never done in her life, as a woman, in surrender to pain and in a last, futile protest against it.

Holding her so that she stood and moved only by means of his body, not hers, he led her to the couch and tried to make her sit down beside him, but she slipped to the floor, to sit at his feet and bury her face in his knees and sob without defense or disguise.

He did not lift her, he let her cry, with his arm tight about her. She felt his hand on her head, on her shoulder, she felt the protection of his firmness, a firmness which seemed to tell her that as her tears were for both of them, so was his knowledge, that he knew her pain and felt it and understood, yet was able to witness it calmly—and his calm seemed to lift her burden, by granting her the right to break, here, at his feet, by telling her that he was able to carry what she could not carry any longer. She knew dimly that this was the real Hank Rearden, and no matter what form of insulting cruelty he had once given to their first nights together, no matter how often she had seemed as the stronger of the two, this had always been within him and at the root of their bond—this strength of his which would protect her if ever hers were gone.

When she raised her head, he was smiling down at her.

“Hank...” she whispered guiltily, in desperate astonishment at her own break.

“Quiet, darling.”

She let her face drop back on his knees; she lay still, fighting for rest, fighting against the pressure of a wordless thought: he had been able to bear and to accept her broadcast only as a confession of her love; it made the truth she now had to tell him more inhuman a blow than anyone had the right to deliver. She felt terror at the thought that she would not have the strength to do it, and terror at the thought that she would.

When she looked up at him again, he ran his hand over her forehead, brushing the hair off her face.

“It’s over, darling,” he said. “The worst of it is over, for both of us.”

“No, Hank, it isn’t.”

He smiled.

He drew her to sit beside him, with her head on his shoulder. “Don’t say anything now,” he said. “You know that we both understand all that has to be said, and we’ll speak of it, but not until it has ceased to hurt you quite so much.”

His hand moved down the line of her sleeve, down a fold of her skirt, with so light a pressure that it seemed as if the hand did not feel the body inside the clothes, as if he were regaining possession, not of her body, but only of its vision.

“You’ve taken too much,” he said. “So have I. Let them batter us.

There’s no reason why we should add to it. No matter what we have to face, there can be no suffering between the two of us. No added pain.

Let that come from their world. It won’t come from us. Don’t be afraid.

We won’t hurt each other. Not now.”

She raised her head, shaking it with a bitter smile—there was a desperate violence in her movement, but the smile was a sign of recovery: of the determination to face the despair.

“Hank, the kind of hell I let you go through in the last month—”

Her voice was trembling.

“It’s nothing, compared to the kind of hell I let you go through in the last hour.” His voice was steady.

She got up, to pace the room, to prove her strength—her steps like words telling him that she was not to be spared any longer. When she stopped and turned to face him, he rose, as if he understood her motive.

“I know that I’ve made it worse for you,” she said, pointing at the radio.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Hank, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“So have I. Will you let me speak first? You see, it’s something I should have said to you long ago. Will you let me speak and not answer me until I finish?”

She nodded.

He took a moment to look at her as she stood before him, as if to hold the full sight of her figure, of this moment and of everything that had led them to it.

“I love you, Dagny,” he said quietly, with the simplicity of an unclouded, yet unsmiling happiness.

She was about to speak, but knew that she couldn’t, even if he had permitted it, she caught her unuttered words, the movement of her lips was her only answer, then she inclined her head in acceptance.

“I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I’ve made and the things I’ve felt, as my product, as my choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I’ve never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live.”

She did not drop her face, but kept it level and open, to hear and accept, as he wanted her to and as he deserved.

“I loved you from the first day I saw you, on a flatcar on a siding of Milford Station. I loved you when we rode in the cab of the first engine on the John Galt Line. I loved you on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt’s house. I loved you on that next morning. You knew it. But it’s I who must say it to you, as I’m saying it now—if I am to redeem all those days and to let them be fully what they were for both of us, I loved you. You knew it. I didn’t. And because I didn’t, I had to learn it when I sat at my desk and looked at the Gift Certificate for Rearden Metal.”

She closed her eyes. But there was no suffering in his face, nothing but the immense and quiet happiness of clarity.

“‘We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies.’ You said it in your broadcast tonight.

But you knew it, then, on that morning in Ellis Wyatt’s house. You knew that all those insults I was throwing at you were the fullest confession of love a man could make. You knew that the physical desire I was damning as our mutual shame, is neither physical nor an expression of one’s body, but the expression of one’s mind’s deepest values, whether one has the courage to know it or not. That was why you laughed at me as you did, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You said, ‘I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul—so long as it’s to me that you will come for that lowest one of your desires.’ You knew, when you said it, that it was my mind, my will, my being and my soul that I was giving you by means of that desire. And I want to say it now, to let that morning mean what it meant: my mind, my will, my being and my soul, Dagny—yours, for as long as I shall live.”

He was looking straight at her and she saw a brief sparkle in his eyes, which was not a smile, but almost as if he had heard the cry she had not uttered.

“Let me finish, dearest. I want you to know how fully I know what I am saying. I, who thought that I was fighting them, I had accepted the worst of our enemies’ creed—and that is what I’ve paid for ever since, as I am paying now and as I must. I had accepted the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he’s started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and body. I had accepted it, like most of their victims, not knowing it, not knowing even that the issue existed. I rebelled against their creed of human impotence and I took pride in my ability to think, to act, to work for the satisfaction of my desires.

But I did not know that this was virtue, I never identified it as a moral value, as the highest of moral values, to be defended above one’s life, because it’s that which makes life possible. And I accepted punishment for it, punishment for virtue at the hands of an arrogant evil, made arrogant solely by my ignorance and my submission.

“I accepted their insults, their frauds, their extortions. I thought I could afford to ignore them—all those impotent mystics who prattle about their souls and are unable to build a roof over their heads. I thought that the world was mine, and that those jabbering incompetents were no threat to my strength. I could not understand why I kept losing every battle. I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own. While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered to them the realm of the mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality. I had accepted, unwittingly and by default, the tenet that ideas were of no consequence to one’s existence, to one’s work, to reality, to this earth—as if ideas were not the province of reason, but of that mystic faith which I despised. This was all they wanted me to concede. It was enough. I had surrendered that which all of their claptrap is designed to subvert and to destroy: man’s reason.

No, they were not able to deal with matter, to produce abundance, to control this earth. They did not have to. They controlled me.

“I, who knew that wealth is only a means to an end, created the means and let them prescribe my ends. I, who took pride in my ability to achieve the satisfaction of my desires, let them prescribe the code of values by which I judged my desires. I, who shaped matter to serve my purpose, was left with a pile of steel and gold, but with my every purpose defeated, my every desire betrayed, my every attempt at happiness frustrated.

“I had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of rules, but my own life by another. I rebelled against the looters’ attempt to set the price and value of my steel—but I let them set the moral values of my life. I rebelled against demands for an unearned wealth—but I thought it was my duty to grant an unearned love to a wife I despised, an unearned respect to a mother who hated me, an unearned support to a brother who plotted for my destruction. I rebelled against undeserved financial injury—but I accepted a life of undeserved pain. I rebelled against the doctrine that my productive ability was guilt—but I accepted, as guilt, my capacity for happiness. I rebelled against the creed that virtue is some disembodied unknowable of the spirit—but I damned you, you, my dearest one, for the desire of your body and mine. But if the body is evil; then so are those who provide the means of its survival, so is material wealth and those who produce it—and if moral values are set in contradiction to our physical existence, then it’s right that rewards should be unearned, that virtue should consist of the undone, that there should be no tie between achievement and profit, that the inferior animals who’re able to produce should serve those superior beings whose superiority in spirit consists of incompetence in the flesh.

“If some man like Hugh Akston had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystics’ theory of sex I was accepting the looters’ theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face. I would not laugh at him now. Now I see Rearden Steel being ruled by human scum—I see the achievement of my life serving to enrich the worst of my enemies—and as to the only two persons I ever loved, I’ve brought a deadly insult to one and public disgrace to the other. I slapped the face of the man who was my friend, my defender, my teacher, the man who set me free by helping me to learn what I’ve learned, I loved him, Dagny, he was the brother, the son, the comrade I never had—but I knocked him out of my life, because he would not help me to produce for the looters. I’d give anything now to have him back, but I own nothing to offer in such repayment, and I’ll never see him again, because it’s I who’ll know that there is no way to deserve even the right to ask forgiveness.

“But what I’ve done to you, my dearest, is still worse. Your speech and that you had to make it—that’s what I’ve brought upon the only woman I loved, in payment for the only happiness I’ve known. Don’t tell me that it was your choice from the first and that you accepted all consequences, including tonight—it does not redeem the fact that it was I who had no better choice to offer you. And that the looters forced you to speak, that you spoke to avenge me and set me free—does not redeem the fact that it was I who made their tactics possible.

It was not then own convictions of sin and dishonor that they could use to disgrace you—it was mine. They merely carried out the things I believed and said in Ellis Wyatt’s house. It was I who kept our love bidden as a guilty secret—they merely treated it for what it was by my own appraisal. It was I who was willing to counterfeit reality for the sake of appearance in their eyes—they merely cashed in on the right I had given them.

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie—the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on. When I chose to hide my love for you, to disavow it in public and live it as a lie, I made it public property—and the public has claimed it in a fitting sort of manner. I had no way to avert it and no power to save you. When I gave in to the looters, when I signed their Gift Certificate, to protect you—I was still faking reality, there was nothing else left open to me—and, Dagny, I’d rather have seen us both dead than permit them to do what they threatened. But there are no white lies, there is only the blackness of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all. I was still faking reality, and it had the inexorable result: instead of protection, it brought you a more terrible kind of ordeal, instead of saving your name, it forced you to offer yourself for a public stoning and to throw the stones by your own hand. I know that you were proud of the things you said, and I was proud to hear you—but that was the pride we should have claimed two years ago.

“No, you did not make it worse for me, you set me free, you saved us both, you redeemed our past. I can’t ask you to forgive me, we’re far beyond such terms—and the only atonement I can offer you is the fact that I am happy. That I am happy, my darling, not that I suffer. I am happy that I have seen the truth—even if my power of sight is all that’s left to me now. Were I to surrender to pain and give up in futile regret that my own error has wrecked my past—that would be the act of final treason, the ultimate failure toward that truth I regret having failed. But if my love of truth is left as my only possession, then the greater the loss behind me, the greater the pride I may take in the price I have paid for that love. Then the wreckage will not become a funereal mount above me, but will serve as a height I have climbed to attain a wider field of vision. My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started—and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach.

“And, Dagny, the one thing I wanted, as the first step of my future, was to say that I love you—as I’m saying it now. I love you, my dearest, with that blindest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind—and my love for you is the only attainment of my past that will be left to me, unchanged, through all the years ahead. I wanted to say it to you while I still had the right to say it. And because I had not said it at our beginning, this is the way I have to say it—at the end. Now I’ll tell you what it was that you wanted to tell me—because, you see, I know it and I accept: somewhere within the past month, you have met the man you love, and if love means one’s final, irreplaceable choice, then he is the only man you’ve ever loved.”

“Yes!” Her voice was half-gasp, half-scream, as under a physical blow, with shock as her only awareness. “Hank!—how did you know it?”

He smiled and pointed at the radio. “My darling, you used nothing but the past tense.”

“Oh... !” Her voice was now half-gasp, half-moan, and she closed her eyes.

“You never pronounced the one word you would have rightfully thrown at them, were it otherwise. You said, ‘I wanted him,’ not, ‘I love him.’ You told me on the phone today that you could have returned sooner. No other reason would have made you leave me as you did. Only that one reason was valid and right.”

She was leaning back a little, as if fighting for balance to stand, yet she was looking straight at him, with a smile that did not part her lips, but softened her eyes to a glance of admiration and her mouth to a shape of pain.

“It’s true. I’ve met the man I love and will always love, I’ve seen him, I’ve spoken to him—but he’s a man whom I can’t have, whom I may never have and, perhaps, may never see again.”

“I think I’ve always known that you would find him. I knew what you felt for me, I knew how much it was, but I knew that I was not your final choice. What you’ll give him is not taken away from me, it’s what I’ve never had. I can’t rebel against it. What I’ve had means too much to me—and that I’ve had it, can never be changed.”

“Do you want me to say it, Hank? Will you understand it, if I say that I’ll always love you?”

“I think I’ve understood it before you did.”

“I’ve always seen you as you are now. That greatness of yours which you are just beginning to allow yourself to know—I’ve always known it and I’ve watched your struggle to discover it. Don’t speak of atonement, you have not hurt me, your mistakes came from your magnificent integrity under the torture of an impossible code—and your fight against it did not bring me suffering, it brought me the feeling I’ve found too seldom: admiration. If you will accept it, it will always be yours. What you meant to me can never be changed. But the man I met—he is the love I had wanted to reach long before I knew that he existed, and I think he will remain beyond my reach, but that I love him will be enough to keep me living.”

He took her hand and pressed it to his lips. “Then you know what I feel,” he said, “and why I am still happy.”

Looking up at his face, she realized that for the first time he was what she had always thought him intended to be: a man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence. The taut look of endurance, of fiercely unadmitted pain, was gone; now, in the midst of the wreckage and of his hardest hour, his face had the serenity of pure strength; it had the look she had seen in the faces of the men in the valley.

“Hank,” she whispered, “I don’t think I can explain it, but I feel that I have committed no treason, either to you or to him.”

“You haven’t.”

Her eyes seemed abnormally alive in a face drained of color, as if her consciousness remained untouched in a body broken by exhaustion. He made her sit down and slipped his arm along the back of the couch, not touching her, yet holding her in a protective embrace.

“Now tell me,” he asked, “where were you?”

“I can’t tell you that. I’ve given my word never to reveal anything about it. I can say only that it’s a place I found by accident, when I crashed, and I left it blindfolded—and I wouldn’t be able to find it again.”

“Couldn’t you trace your way back to it?”

“I won’t try.”

“And the man?”

“I won’t look for him.”

“He remained there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you leave him?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Who is he?”

Her chuckle of desperate amusement was involuntary. “Who is John Galt?”

He glanced at her, astonished—but realized that she was not joking.

“So there is a John Galt?” he asked slowly.

“Yes.”

“That slang phrase refers to him?”

“Yes.”

“And it has some special meaning?”

“Oh yes!... There’s one thing I can tell you about him, because I discovered it earlier, without promise of secrecy: he is the man who invented the motor we found.”

“Oh!” He smiled, as if he should have known it. Then he said softly, with a glance that was almost compassion, “He’s the destroyer, isn’t he?” He saw her look of shock, and added, “No, don’t answer me, if you can’t. I think I know where you were. It was Quentin Daniels that you wanted to save from the destroyer, and you were following Daniels when you crashed, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good God, Dagny!—does such a place really exist? Are they all alive? Is there... ? I’m sorry. Don’t answer.”

She smiled. “It does exist.”

He remained silent for a long time.

“Hank, could you give up Rearden Steel?”

“No!” The answer was fiercely immediate, but he added, with the first sound of hopelessness in his voice, “Not yet.”

Then he looked at her, as if, in the transition of his three words, he had lived the course of her agony of the past month. “I see,” he said. He ran his hand over her forehead, with a gesture of understanding, of compassion, of an almost incredulous wonder. “What hell you’ve now undertaken to endure!” he said, his voice low.

She nodded.

She slipped down, to lie stretched, her face on his knees. He stroked her hair; he said, “We’ll fight the looters as long as we can. I don’t know what future is possible to us, but we’ll win or we’ll learn that it’s hopeless. Until we do, we’ll fight for our world. We’re all that’s left of it.”

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

CHAPTER IV ANTI-LIFE

James Taggart reached into the pocket of his dinner jacket, pulled out the first wad of paper he found, which was a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it into the beggar’s hand.

He noticed that the beggar pocketed the money in a manner as indifferent as his own.

“Thanks, bud,” said the beggar contemptuously, and walked away.

James Taggart remained still in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering what gave him a sense of shock and dread. It was not the man’s insolence—he had not sought any gratitude, he had not been moved by pity, his gesture had been automatic and meaningless. It was that the beggar acted as if he would have been indifferent had he received a hundred dollars or a dime or, failing to find any help whatever, had seen himself dying of starvation within this night. Taggart shuddered and walked brusquely on, the shudder serving to cut off the realization that the beggar’s mood matched his own.

The walls of the street around him had the stressed, unnatural clarity of a summer twilight, while an orange haze filled the channels of intersections and veiled the tiers of roofs, leaving him on a shrinking remnant of ground. The calendar in the sky seemed to stand insistently out of the haze, yellow like a page of old parchment, saying: August 5. No—he thought, in answer to things he had not named—it was not true, he felt fine, that’s why he wanted to do something tonight. He could not admit to himself that his peculiar restlessness came from a desire to experience pleasure; he could not admit that the particular pleasure he wanted was that of celebration, because he could not admit what it was that he wanted to celebrate.

This had been a day of intense activity, spent on words floating as vaguely as cotton, yet achieving a purpose as precisely as an adding machine, summing up to his full satisfaction. But his purpose and the nature of his satisfaction had to be kept as carefully hidden from himself as they had been from others; and his sudden craving for pleasure was a dangerous breach.

The day had started with a small luncheon in the hotel suite of a visiting Argentinian legislator, where a few people of various nationalities had talked at leisurely length about the climate of Argentina, its soil, its resources, the needs of its people, the value of a dynamic, progressive attitude toward the future—and had mentioned, as the briefest topic of conversation, that Argentina would be declared a People’s State within two weeks.

It had been followed by a few cocktails at the home of Orren Boyle, with only one unobtrusive gentleman from Argentina sitting silently in a corner, while two executives from Washington and a few friends of unspecified positions had talked about national resources, metallurgy, mineralogy, neighborly duties and the welfare of the globe—and had mentioned that a loan of four billion dollars would be granted within three weeks to the People’s State of Argentina and the People’s State of Chile.

It had been followed by a small cocktail party in a private room of the bar built like a cellar on the roof of a skyscraper, an informal party given by him, James Taggart, for the directors of a recently formed company, The Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation, of which Orren Boyle was president and a slender, graceful, overactive man from Chile was treasurer, a man whose name was Senor Mario Martinez, but whom Taggart was tempted, by some resemblance of spirit, to call Senor Cuffy Meigs. Here they had talked about golf, horse races, boat races, automobiles and women. It had not been necessary to mention, since they all knew it, that the Interneighborly Amity and Development Corporation had an exclusive contract to operate, on a twenty-year “managerial lease,” all the industrial properties of the People’s States of the Southern Hemisphere.

The last event of the day had been a large dinner reception at the home of Senor Rodrigo Gonzales, a diplomatic representative of Chile.

No one had heard of Senor Gonzales a year ago, but he had become famous for the parties he had given in the past six months, ever since his arrival in New York. His guests described him as a progressive businessman. He had lost his property—it was said—when Chile, becoming a People’s State, had nationalized all properties, except those belonging to citizens of backward, non-People’s countries, such as Argentina; but he had adopted an enlightened attitude and had joined the new regime, placing himself in the service of his country. His home in New York occupied an entire floor of an exclusive residential hotel.

He had a fat, blank face and the eyes of a killer. Watching him at tonight’s reception, Taggart had concluded that the man was impervious to any sort of feeling, he looked as if a knife could slash, unnoticed, through his pendulous layers of flesh—except that there was a lewd, almost sexual relish in the way he rubbed his feet against the rich pile of his Persian rugs, or patted the polished arm of his chair, or folded his lips about a cigar. His wife, the Senora Gonzales, was a small, attractive woman, not as beautiful as she assumed, but enjoying the reputation of a beauty by means of a violent nervous energy and an odd manner of loose, warm, cynical self-assertiveness that seemed to promise anything and to absolve anyone. It was known that her particular brand of trading was her husband’s chief asset, in an age when one traded, not goods, but favors—and, watching her among the guests, Taggart had found amusement in wondering what deals had been made, what directives issued, what industries destroyed in exchange for a few chance nights, which most of those men had had no reason to seek and, perhaps, could no longer remember. The party had bored him, there had been only half a dozen persons for whose sake he had put in an appearance, and it had not been necessary to speak to that half-dozen, merely to be seen and to exchange a few glances. Dinner had been about to be served, when he had heard what he had come to hear: Senor Gonzales had mentioned—the smoke of his cigar weaving over the half-dozen men who had drifted toward his armchair—that by agreement with the future People’s State of Argentina, the properties of d’Anconia Copper would be nationalized by the People’s State of Chile, in less than a month, on September 2.

It had all gone as Taggart had expected; the unexpected had come when, on hearing those words, he had felt an irresistible urge to escape.

He had felt incapable of enduring the boredom of the dinner, as if some other form of activity were needed to greet the achievement of this night. He had walked out into the summer twilight of the streets, feeling as if he were both pursuing and pursued: pursuing a pleasure which nothing could give him, in celebration of a feeling which he dared not name—pursued by the dread of discovering what motive had moved him through the planning of tonight’s achievement and what aspect of it now gave him this feverish sense of gratification.

He reminded himself that he would sell his d’Anconia Copper stock, which had never rallied fully after its crash of last year, and he would purchase shares of the Inter-neighborly Amity and Development Corporation, as agreed with his friends, which would bring him a fortune. But the thought brought him nothing but boredom; this was not the thing he wanted to celebrate.

He tried to force himself to enjoy it: money, he thought, had been his motive, money, nothing worse. Wasn’t that a normal motive? A valid one? Wasn’t that what they all were after, the Wyatts, the Reardens, the d’Anconias?... He jerked his head to stop it: he felt as if his thoughts were slipping down a dangerous blind alley, the end of which he must never permit himself to see.

No—he thought bleakly, in reluctant admission—money meant nothing to him any longer. He had thrown dollars about by the hundreds—at that party he had given today—for unfinished drinks, for uneaten delicacies, for unprovoked tips and unexpected whims, for a long distance phone call to Argentina because one of the guests had wanted to check the exact version of a smutty story he had started telling, for the spur of any moment, for the clammy stupor of knowing that it was easier to pay than to think.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about, under that Railroad Unification Plan,” Orren Boyle had giggled to him drunkenly. Under the Railroad Unification Plan, a local railroad had gone bankrupt in North Dakota, abandoning the region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed suicide, first killing his wife and children—a freight train had been taken oil the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation at a day’s notice, the factory owner’s son had quit college and was now in jail, awaiting execution for a murder committed with a gang of raiders—a way station had been closed in Kansas, and the station agent, who had wanted to be a scientist, had given up his studies and become a dishwasher—that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom and pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle’s throat, for the waiter who sponged Boyle’s garments when he spilled his drink over his chest, for the carpet burned by the cigarettes of an ex-pimp from Chile who did not want to take the trouble of reaching for an ashtray across a distance of three feet.

It was not the knowledge of his indifference to money that now gave him a shudder of dread. It was the knowledge that he would be equally indifferent, were he reduced to the state of the beggar. There had been a time when he had felt some measure of guilt—in no clearer a form than a touch of irritation—at the thought that he shared the sin of greed, which he spent his time denouncing. Now he was hit by the chill realization that, in fact, he had never been a hypocrite: in full truth, he had never cared for money. This left another hole gaping open before him, leading into another blind alley which he could not risk seeing.

I just want to do something tonight!—he cried soundlessly to someone at large, in protest and in demanding anger—in protest against whatever it was that kept forcing these thoughts into his mind—in anger at a universe where some malevolent power would not permit him to find enjoyment without the need to know what he wanted or why.

What do you want?—some enemy voice kept asking, and he walked faster, trying to escape it. It seemed to him that his brain was a maze where a blind alley opened at every turn, leading into a fog that hid an abyss. It seemed to him that he was running, while the small island of safety was shrinking and nothing but those alleys would soon be left. It was like the remnant of clarity in the street around him, with the haze rolling in to fill all exits. Why did it have to shrink?—he thought in panic. This was the way he had lived all his life—keeping his eyes stubbornly, safely on the immediate pavement before him, craftily avoiding the sight of his road, of corners, of distances, of pinnacles. He had never intended going anywhere, he had wanted to be free of progression, free of the yoke of a straight line, he had never wanted his years to add up to any sum—what had summed them up?—why had he reached some unchosen destination where one could no longer stand still or retreat? “Look where you’re going, brother!” snarled some voice, while an elbow pushed him back—and he realized that he had collided with some large, ill-smelling figure and that he had been running.

He slowed his steps and admitted into his mind a recognition of the streets he had chosen in his random escape. He had not wanted to know that he was going home to his wife. That, too, was a fogbound alley, but there was no other left to him.

He knew—the moment he saw Cherryl’s silent, poised figure as she rose at his entrance into her room—that this was more dangerous than he had allowed himself to know and that he would not find what he wanted. But danger, to him, was a signal to shut off his sight, suspend his judgment and pursue an unaltered course, on the unstated premise that the danger would remain unreal by the sovereign power of his wish not to see it—like a foghorn within him, blowing, not to sound a warning, but to summon the fog.

“Why, yes, I did have an important business banquet to attend, but I changed my mind, I felt like having dinner with you tonight,” he said in the tone of a compliment—but a quiet “I see” was the only answer he obtained.

He felt irritation at her unastonished manner and her pale, unrevealing face. He felt irritation at the smooth efficiency with which she gave instructions to the servants, then at finding himself in the candlelight of the dining room, facing her across a perfectly appointed table, with two crystal cups of fruit in silver bowls of ice between them.

It was her poise that irritated him most; she was no longer an incongruous little freak, dwarfed by the luxury of the residence which a famous artist had designed; she matched it. She sat at the table as if she were the kind of hostess that room had the right to demand. She wore a tailored housecoat of russet-colored brocade that blended with the bronze of her hair, the severe simplicity of its lines serving as her only ornament. He would have preferred the jingling bracelets and rhinestone buckles of her past. Her eyes disturbed him, as they had for months: they were neither friendly nor hostile, but watchful and questioning.

“I closed a big deal today,” he said, his tone part boastful, part pleading. “A deal involving this whole continent and half a dozen governments.”

He realized that the awe, the admiration, the eager curiosity he had expected, belonged to the face of the little shop girl who had ceased to exist. He saw none of it in the face of his wife; even anger or hatred would have been preferable to her level, attentive glance; the glance was worse than accusing, it was inquiring.

“What deal, Jim?”

“What do you mean, what deal? Why are you suspicious? Why do you have to start prying at once?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was confidential. You don’t have to answer me.”

“It’s not confidential.” He waited, but she remained silent. “Well?

Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“Why, no.” She said it simply, as if to please him.

“So you’re not interested at all?”

“But I thought you didn’t want to discuss it.”

“Oh, don’t be so tricky!” he snapped. “It’s a big business deal. That’s what you admire, isn’t it, big business? Well, it’s bigger than anything those boys ever dreamed of. They spend their lives grubbing for their fortunes penny by penny, while I can do it like that”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that. It’s the biggest single stunt ever pulled.”

“Stunt, Jim?”

“Deal!”

“And you did it? Yourself?”

“You bet I did it! That fat fool, Orren Boyle, couldn’t have swung it in a million years. This took knowledge and skill and timing”—he saw a spark of interest in her eyes—“and psychology.” The spark vanished, but he went rushing heedlessly on. “One had to know how to approach Wesley, and how to keep the wrong influences away from him, and how to get Mr. Thompson interested without letting him know too much, and how to cut Chick Morrison in on it, but keep Tinky Holloway out, and how to get the right people to give a few parties for Wesley at the right time, and... Say, Cherryl, is there any champagne in this house?”

“Champagne?”

“Can’t we do something special tonight? Can’t we have a sort of celebration together?”

“We can have champagne, yes, Jim, of course.”

She rang the bell and gave the orders, in her odd, lifeless, uncritical manner, a manner of meticulous compliance with his wishes while volunteering none of her own.

“You don’t seem to be very impressed,” he said. “But what would you know about business, anyway? You wouldn’t be able to understand anything on so large a scale. Wait till September second. Wait till they hear about it.”

“They? Who?”

He glanced at her, as if he had let a dangerous word slip out involuntarily, “We’ve organized a setup where we—me, Orren and a few friends—are going to control every industrial property south of the border.”

“Whose property?”

“Why... the people’s. This is not an old-fashioned grab for private profit. It’s a deal with a mission—a worthy, public-spirited mission—to manage the nationalized properties of the various People’s States of South America, to teach their workers our modern techniques of production, to help the underprivileged who’ve never had a chance, to—” He broke off abruptly, though she had merely sat looking at him without shifting her glance. “You know,” he said suddenly, with a cold little chuckle, “if you’re so damn anxious to hide that you came from the slums, you ought to be less indifferent to the philosophy of social welfare. It’s always the poor who lack humanitarian instincts. One has to be born to wealth in order to know the finer feelings of altruism.”

“I’ve never tried to hide that I came from the slums,” she said in the simple, impersonal tone of a factual correction. “And I haven’t any sympathy for that welfare philosophy. I’ve seen enough of them to know what makes the kind of poor who want something for nothing.”

He did not answer, and she added suddenly, her voice astonished, but firm, as if in final confirmation of a long-standing doubt, “Jim, you don’t care about it, either. You don’t care about any of that welfare hogwash.”

“Well, if money is all that you’re interested in,” he snapped, “let me tell you that that deal will bring me a fortune. That’s what you’ve always admired, isn’t it, wealth?”

“It depends.”

“I think I’ll end up as one of the richest men in the world,” he said; he did not ask what her admiration depended upon. “There’s nothing I won’t be able to afford. Nothing. Just name it. I can give you anything you want. Go on, name it.”

“I don’t want anything, Jim.”

“But I’d like to give you a present! To celebrate the occasion, see?

Anything you take it into your head to ask. Anything. I can do it. I want to show you that I can do it. Any fancy you care to name.”

“I haven’t any fancies.”

“Oh, come on! Want a yacht?”

“No.”

“Want me to buy you the whole neighborhood where you lived in Buffalo?”

“No.”

“Want the crown jewels of the People’s State of England? They can be had, you know. That People’s State has been hinting about it on the black market for a long time. But there aren’t any old-fashioned tycoons left who’re able to afford it. I’m able to afford it—or will be, after September second. Want it?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I don’t want anything, Jim.”

“But you’ve got to! You’ve got to want something, damn you!”

She looked at him, faintly startled, but otherwise indifferent.

“Oh, all right, I’m sorry,” he said; he seemed astonished by his own outbreak. “I just wanted to please you,” he added sullenly, “but I guess you can’t understand it at all. You don’t know how important it is.

You don’t know how big a man you’re married to.”

“I’m trying to find out,” she said slowly.

“Do you still think, as you used to, that Hank Rearden is a great man?”

“Yes, Jim, I do.”

“Well, I’ve got him beaten. I’m greater than any of them, greater than Rearden and greater than that other lover of my sister’s, who—”

He stopped, as if he had slid too far.

“Jim,” she asked evenly, “what is going to happen on September second?”

He glanced up at her, from under his forehead—a cold glance, while his muscles creased into a semi-smile, as if in cynical breach of some hallowed restraint. “They’re going to nationalize d’Anconia Copper,” he said.

He heard the long, harsh roll of a motor, as a plane went by somewhere in the darkness above the roof, then a thin tinkle, as a piece of ice settled, melting, in the silver bowl of his fruit cup—before she answered. She said, “He was your friend, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, shut up!”

He remained silent, not looking at her. When his eyes came back to her face, she was still watching him and she spoke first, her voice oddly stern: “What your sister did in her radio broadcast was great.”

“Yes, I know, I know, you’ve been saying that for a month.”

“You’ve never answered me.”

“What is there to ans... ?”

“Just as your friends in Washington have never answered her.” He remained silent. “Jim, I’m not dropping the subject.” He did not answer.

“Your friends in Washington never uttered a word about it. They did not deny the things she said, they did not explain, they did not try to justify themselves. They acted as if she had never spoken. I think they’re hoping that people will forget it. Some people will. But the rest of us know what she said and that your friends were afraid to fight her.”

“That’s not true! The proper action was taken and the incident is closed and I don’t see why you keep bringing it up.”

“What action?”

“Bertram Scudder was taken off the air, as a program not in the public interest at the present time.”

“Does that answer her?”

“It closes the issue and there’s nothing more to be said about it.”

“About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?”

“You can’t say that nothing was done. It’s been publicly announced that Scudder’s programs were disruptive, destructive and untrustworthy.”

“Jim, I want to understand this. Scudder wasn’t on her side—he was on yours. He didn’t even arrange that broadcast. He was acting on orders from Washington, wasn’t he?”

“I thought you didn’t like Bertram Scudder.”

“I didn’t and I don’t, but—”

“Then what do you care?”

“But he was innocent, as far as your friends were concerned, wasn’t he?”

“I wish you wouldn’t bother with politics. You talk like a fool.”

“He was innocent, wasn’t he?”

“So what?”

She looked at him, her eyes incredulously wide. “Then they just made him the scapegoat, didn’t they?”

“Oh, don’t sit there looking like Eddie Willers!”

“Do I? I like Eddie Willers. He’s honest.”

“He’s a damn half-wit who doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to deal with practical reality!”

“But you do, don’t you, Jim?”

“You bet I do!”

“Then couldn’t you have helped Scudder?”

“I?” He burst into helpless, angry laughter. “Oh, why don’t you grow up? I did my best to get Scudder thrown to the lions! Somebody had to be. Don’t you know that it was my neck, if some other hadn’t been found?”

“Your neck? Why not Dagny’s, if she was wrong? Because she wasn’t?”

“Dagny is in an entirely different category! It had to be Scudder or me.”

“Why?”

“And it’s much better for national policy to let it be Scudder. This way, it’s not necessary to argue about what she said—and if anybody brings it up, we start howling that it was said on Scudder’s program and that Scudder’s programs have been discredited and that Scudder is a proven fraud and liar, etc., etc.—and do you think the public will be able to unscramble it? Nobody’s ever trusted Bertram Scudder, anyway.

Oh, don’t stare at me like that! Would you rather they’d picked me to discredit?”

“Why not Dagny? Because her speech could not be discredited?”

“If you’re so damn sorry for Bertram Scudder, you should have seen him try his damn best to make them break my neck! He’s been doing that for years—how do you think he got to where he was, except by climbing on carcasses? He thought he was pretty powerful, too—you should have seen how the big business tycoons used to be afraid of him! But he got himself outmaneuvered, this time. This time, he belonged to the wrong faction.”

Dimly, through the pleasant stupor of relaxing, of sprawling back in his chair and smiling, he knew that this was the enjoyment he wanted: to be himself. To be himself—he thought, in the drugged, precarious state of floating past the deadliest of his blind alleys, the one that led to the question of what was himself.

“You see, he belonged to the Tinky Holloway faction. It was pretty much of a seesaw for a while, between the Tinky Holloway faction and the Chick Morrison faction. But we won. Tinky made a deal and agreed to scuttle his pal Bertram in exchange for a few things he needed from us. You should have heard Bertram howl! But he was a dead duck and he knew it.”

He started on a rolling chuckle, but choked it off, as the haze cleared and he saw his wife’s face. “Jim,” she whispered, “is that the sort of... victories you’re winning?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he screamed, smashing his fist down on the table. “Where have you been all these years? What sort of world do you think you’re living in?” His blow had upset his water glass and the water went spreading in dark stains over the lace of the tablecloth.

“I’m trying to find out,” she whispered. Her shoulders were sagging and her face looked suddenly worn, an odd, aged look that seemed haggard and lost.

“I couldn’t help it!” he burst out in the silence. “I’m not to blame! I have to take things as I find them! It’s not I who’ve made this world!”

He was shocked to see that she smiled—a smile of so fiercely bitter a contempt that it seemed incredible on her gently patient face; she was not looking at him, but at some image of her own. “That’s what my father used to say when he got drunk at the corner saloon instead of looking for work.”

“How dare you try comparing me to—” he started, but did not finish, because she was not listening.

Her words, when she looked at him again, astonished him as completely irrelevant. “The date of that nationalization, September second,” she asked, her voice wistful, “was it you who picked it?”

“No. I had nothing to do with it. It’s the date of some special session of their legislature. Why?”

“It’s the date of our first wedding anniversary.”

“Oh? Oh, that’s right!” He smiled, relieved at the change to a safe subject. “We’ll have been married a year. My, it doesn’t seem that long!”

“It seems much longer,” she said tonelessly.

She was looking off again, and he felt in sudden uneasiness that the subject was not safe at all; he wished she would not look as if she were seeing the whole course of that year and of their marriage.

... not to get scared, but to learn—she thought—the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn... The words came from a sentence she had repeated to herself so often that it felt like a pillar polished smooth by the helpless weight of her body, the pillar that had supported her through the past year. She tried to repeat it, but she felt as if her hands were slipping on the polish, as if the sentence would not stave off terror any longer—because she was beginning to understand.

If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

... It was in the bewildered loneliness of the first weeks of her marriage that she said it to herself for the first time. She could not understand Jim’s behavior, or his sullen anger, which looked like weakness, or his evasive, incomprehensible answers to her questions, which sounded like cowardice; such traits were not possible in the James Taggart whom she had married. She told herself that she could not condemn without understanding, that she knew nothing about his world, that the extent of her ignorance was the extent to which she misinterpreted his actions. She took the blame, she took the beating of self reproach—against some bleakly stubborn certainty which told her that something was wrong and that the thing she felt was fear.

“I must learn everything that Mrs. James Taggart is expected to know and to be,” was the way she explained her purpose to a teacher of etiquette. She set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man she had seen on the night of his railroad’s triumph.

She could not understand Jim’s attitude when she told him about her lessons. He burst out laughing; she was unable to believe that the laughter had a sound of malicious contempt. “Why, Jim? Why? What are you laughing at?” He would not explain—almost as if the fact of his contempt were sufficient and required no reasons.

She could not suspect him of malice: he was too patiently generous about her mistakes. He seemed eager to display her in the best drawing rooms of the city, and he never uttered a word of reproach for her ignorance, for her awkwardness, for those terrible moments when a silent exchange of glances among the guests and a burst of blood to her cheekbones told her that she had said the wrong thing again. He showed no embarrassment, he merely watched her with a faint smile.

When they came home after one of those evenings, his mood seemed affectionately cheerful. He was trying to make it easier for her, she thought—and gratitude drove her to study the harder.

She expected her reward on the evening when, by some imperceptible transition, she found herself enjoying a party for the first time. She felt free to act, not by rules, but at her own pleasure, with sudden confidence that the rules had fused into a natural habit—she knew that she was attracting attention, but now, for the first time, it was not the attention of ridicule, but of admiration—she was sought after, on her own merit, she was Mrs. Taggart, she had ceased being an object of charity weighing Jim down, painfully tolerated for his sake—she was laughing gaily and seeing the smiles of response, of appreciation on the faces around her—and she kept glancing at him across the room, radiantly, like a child handing him a report card with a perfect score, begging him to be proud of her. Jim sat alone in a corner, watching her with an undecipherable glance.

He would not speak to her on their way home.

“I don’t know why I keep dragging myself to those parties,” he snapped suddenly, tearing off his dress tie in the middle of their living room, “I’ve never sat through such a vulgar, boring waste of time!”

“Why, Jim,” she said, stunned, “I thought it was wonderful.”

“You would! You seemed to be quite at home—quite as if it were Coney Island. I wish you’d learn to keep your place and not to embarrass me in public.”

“I embarrassed you? Tonight?”

“You did!”

“How?”

“If you don’t understand it, I can’t explain,” he said in the tone of a mystic who implies that a lack of understanding is the confession of a shameful inferiority.

“I don’t understand it,” she said firmly. He walked out of the room, slamming the door.

She felt that the inexplicable was not a mere blank, this time: it had a tinge of evil. From that night on, a small, hard point of fear remained within her, like the spot of a distant headlight advancing upon her down an invisible track.

Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim’s world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed—the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood’s slums—the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments—the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud.

She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.

“Jim,” she said once, after an evening spent among the men who were called the intellectual leaders of the country, “Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony—a mean, scared old phony.”

“Now, really,” he answered, “do you think you’re qualified to pass judgment on philosophers?”

“I’m qualified to pass judgment on con men. I’ve seen enough of them to know one when I see him.” “Now this is why I say that you’ll never outgrow your background. If you had, you would have learned to appreciate Dr. Pritchett’s philosophy.” “What philosophy?” “If you don’t understand it, I can’t explain.” She would not let him end the conversation on that favorite formula of his. “Jim,” she said, “he’s a phony, he and Balph Eubank and that whole gang of theirs—and I think you’ve been taken in by them.” Instead of the anger she expected, she saw a brief flash of amusement in the lift of his eyelids. “That’s what you think,” he answered.

She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought—it was a racket that gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now, that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown larger.

She could not remember by what steps, what accumulation of pain, first as small scratches of uneasiness, then as stabs of bewilderment, then as the chronic, nagging pull of fear, she had begun to doubt Jim’s position on the railroad. It was his sudden, angry “so you don’t trust me?” snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize that she did not—when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that his answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted, “I don’t care to talk shop,” was his answer whenever she mentioned the railroad. She tried to plead with him once. “Jim, you know what I think of your work and how much I admire you for it.” “Oh, really?

What is it you married, a man or a railroad president?” “I... I never thought of separating the two.” “Well, it is not very flattering to me.” She looked at him, baffled: she had thought it was. “I’d like to believe,” he said, “that you love me for myself, and not for my railroad.” “Oh God, Jim,” she gasped, “you didn’t think that I—!” “No,” he said, with a sadly generous smile, “I didn’t think that you married me for my money or my position. I have never doubted you.” Realizing, in stunned confusion and in tortured fairness, that she might have given him ground to misinterpret her feeling, that she had forgotten how many bitter disappointments he must have suffered at the hands of fortune-hunting women, she could do nothing but shake her head and moan, “Oh, Jim, that’s not what I meant!” He chuckled softly, as at a child, and slipped his arm around her. “Do you love me?” he asked. “Yes,” she whispered. “Then you must have faith in me. Love is faith, you know. Don’t you see that I need it? I don’t trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don’t you know that I need you?”

The thing that made her pace her room—hours later, in tortured restlessness—was that she wished desperately to believe him and did not believe a word of it, yet knew that it was true.

It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness—almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration—yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him.

He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness.

She did not understand the night, in mid-April, when he returned from a trip to Washington. “Hi, kid!” he said loudly, dropping a sheaf of lilac into her arms. “Happy days are here again! Just saw those flowers and thought of you. Spring is coming, baby!”

He poured himself a drink and paced the room, talking with too light, too brash a manner of gaiety. There was a feverish sparkle in his eyes, and his voice seemed shredded by some unnatural excitement. She began to wonder whether he was elated or crushed.

“I know what it is that they’re planning!” he said suddenly, without transition, and she glanced up at him swiftly: she knew the sound of one of his inner explosions. “There’s not a dozen people in the whole country who know it, but I do! The top boys are keeping it secret till they’re ready to spring it on the nation. Will it surprise a lot of people!

Will it knock them flat! A lot of people? Hell, every single person in this country! It will affect every single person. That’s how important it is.”

“Affect—how, Jim?”

“It will affect them! And they don’t know what’s coming, but I do.

There they sit tonight”—he waved at the lighted windows of the city—“making plans, counting their money, hugging their children or their dreams, and they don’t know, but I do, that all of it will be struck, stopped, changed!”

“Changed—for the worse or the better?”

“For the better, of course,” he answered impatiently, as if it were irrelevant; his voice seemed to lose its fire and to slip into the fraudulent sound of duty. “It’s a plan to save the country, to stop our economic decline, to hold things still, to achieve stability and security.”

“What plan?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s secret. Top secret. You have no idea how many people would like to know it. There’s no industrialist who wouldn’t give a dozen of his best furnaces for just one hint of warning, which he’s not going to get! Like Hank Rearden, for instance, whom you admire so much.” He chuckled, looking off into the future.

“Jim,” she asked, the sound of fear in her voice telling him what the sound of his chuckle had been like, “why do you hate Hank Rearden?”

“I don’t hate him!” He whirled to her, and his face, incredibly, looked anxious, almost frightened. “I never said I hated him. Don’t worry, he’ll approve of the plan. Everybody will. It’s for everybody’s good.” He sounded as if he were pleading. She felt the dizzying certainty that he was lying, yet that the plea was sincere—as if he had a desperate need to reassure her, but not about the things he said.

She forced herself to smile. “Yes, Jim, of course,” she answered, wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it as if it were her part to reassure him.

The look she saw on his face was almost a smile and almost of gratitude. “I had to tell you about it tonight. I had to tell you. I wanted you to know what tremendous issues I deal with. You always talk about my work, but you don’t understand it at all, it’s so much wider than you imagine. You think that running a railroad is a matter of track laying and fancy metals and getting trains there on time. But it’s not.

Any underling can do that. The real heart of a railroad is in Washington. My job is politics. Politics. Decisions made on a national scale, affecting everything, controlling everybody. A few words on paper, a directive—changing the life of every person in every nook, cranny and penthouse of this country!”

“Yes, Jim,” she said, wishing to believe that he was, perhaps, a man of stature in the mysterious realm of Washington.

“You’ll see,” he said, pacing the room. “You think they’re powerful—those giants of industry who’re so clever with motors and furnaces?

They’ll be stopped! They’ll be stripped! They’ll be brought down! They’ll be—” He noticed the way she was staring at him. “It’s not for ourselves,” he snapped hastily, “it’s for the people. That’s the difference between business and politics—we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we’re not after profit, we don’t spend our lives scrambling for money, we don’t have to! That’s why we’re slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-chasers who can’t conceive of a spiritual motive or a moral ideal or... We couldn’t help it!” he cried suddenly, whirling to her. “We had to have that plan! With everything falling to pieces and stopping, something had to be done! We had to stop them from stopping! We couldn’t help it!”

His eyes were desperate; she did not know whether he was boasting or begging for forgiveness; she did not know whether this was triumph or terror. “Jim, don’t you feel well? Maybe you’ve worked too hard and you’re worn out and—”

“I’ve never felt better in my life!” he snapped, resuming his pacing.

“You bet I’ve worked hard. My work is bigger than any job you can hope to imagine. It’s above anything that grubbing mechanics like Rearden and my sister, are doing. Whatever they do, I can undo it. Let them build a track—I can come and break it, just like that!”

He snapped his fingers. “Just like breaking a spine.”

“You want to break spines?” she whispered, trembling.

“I haven’t said that!” he screamed. “What’s the matter with you? I haven’t said it!”

“I’m sorry, Jim!” she gasped, shocked by her own words and by the terror in his eyes. “It’s just that I don’t understand, but... but I know I shouldn’t bother you with questions when you’re so tired”—she was struggling desperately to convince herself—“when you have so many things on your mind... such... such great things... things I can’t even begin to think of...”

His shoulders sagged, relaxing. He approached her and dropped wearily down on his knees, slipping his arms around her. “You poor little fool,” he said affectionately.

She held onto him, moved by something that felt like tenderness and almost like pity. But he raised his head to glance up at her face, and it seemed to her that the look she saw in his eyes was part-gratification, part-contempt—almost as if, by some unknown kind of sanction, she had absolved him and damned herself.

It was useless—she found in the days that followed—to tell herself that these things were beyond her understanding, that it was her duty to believe in him, that love was faith. Her doubt kept growing—doubt of his incomprehensible work and of his relation to the railroad. She wondered why it kept growing in direct proportion to her self-admonitions that faith was the duty she owed him. Then, one sleepless night, she realized that her effort to fulfill that duty consisted of turning away whenever people discussed his job, of refusing to look at newspaper mentions of Taggart Transcontinental, of slamming her mind shut against any evidence and every contradiction. She stopped, aghast, struck by the question: What is it, then—faith versus truth? And realizing that part of her zeal to believe was her fear to know, she set out to learn the truth, with a cleaner, calmer sense of rightness than the effort at dutiful self-fraud had ever given her.

It did not take her long to learn. The evasiveness of the Taggart executives, when she asked a few casual questions, the stale generalities of their answers, the strain of their manner at the mention of their boss, and their obvious reluctance to discuss him—told her nothing concrete, but gave her a feeling equivalent to knowing the worst. The railroad workers were more specific—the switchmen, the gatemen, the ticket sellers whom she drew into chance conversations in the Taggart Terminal and who did not know her. “Jim Taggart? That whining, sniveling, speech-making deadhead!” “Jimmy the President? Well, I’ll tell you: he’s the hobo on the gravy train.” “The boss? Mr. Taggart? You mean Miss Taggart, don’t you?”

It was Eddie Willers who told her the whole truth. She heard that he had known Jim since childhood, and she asked him to lunch with her.

When she faced him at the table, when she saw the earnest, questioning directness of his eyes and the severely literal simplicity of his words, she dropped all attempts at casual prodding, she told him what she wanted to know and why, briefly, impersonally, not appealing for help or for pity, only for truth. He answered her in the same manner. He told her the whole story, quietly, impersonally, pronouncing no verdict, expressing no opinion, never encroaching on her emotions by any sign of concern for them, speaking with the shining austerity and the awesome power of facts. He told her who ran Taggart Transcontinental.

He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known it. “Thank you, Mr. Willers,” was all that she said when he finished.

She waited for Jim to come home, that evening, and the thing that eroded any pain or indignation, was a feeling of her own detachment, as if it did not matter to her any longer, as if some action were required of her, but it made no difference what the action would be or the consequences.

It was not anger that she felt when she saw Jim enter the room, but a murky astonishment, almost as if she wondered who he was and why it should now be necessary to speak to him. She told him what she knew, briefly, in a tired, extinguished voice. It seemed to her that he understood it from her first few sentences, as if he had expected this to come sooner or later.

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” she asked.

“So that’s your idea of gratitude?” he screamed. “So that’s how you feel after everything I’ve done for you? Everybody told me that crudeness and selfishness was all I could expect for lifting a cheap little alley cat by the scruff of her neck!”

She looked at him as if he were making inarticulate sounds that connected to nothing inside her mind. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

“Is that all the love you felt for me, you sneaky little hypocrite? Is that all I get in return for my faith in you?”

“Why did you lie? Why did you let me think what I thought?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, you should be ashamed to face me or speak to me!”

“I?” The inarticulate sounds had connected, but she could not believe the sum they made. “What are you trying to do, Jim?” she asked, her voice incredulous and distant.

“Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first!

That’s the first obligation of any wife—and of a woman in your position in particular! There’s nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!”

For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would destroy it—a stab like a swift recoil from the edge of insanity. By the time she dropped her head, closing her eyes, she knew only that she felt disgust, a sickening disgust for a nameless reason.

When she raised her head, it seemed to her that she caught a glimpse of him watching her with the uncertain, retreating, calculating look of a man whose trick has not worked. But before she had time to believe it, his face was hidden again under an expression of injury and anger.

She said, as if she were naming her thoughts for the benefit of the rational being who was not present, but whose presence she had to assume, since no other could be addressed, “That night... those headlines... that glory... it was not you at all... it was Dagny.”

“Shut up, you rotten little bitch!”

She looked at him blankly, without reaction. She looked as if nothing could reach her, because her dying words had been uttered.

He made the sound of a sob. “Cherryl, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I take it back, I didn’t mean it...”

She remained standing, leaning against the wall, as she had stood from the first.

He dropped down on the edge of a couch, in a posture of helpless dejection. “How could I have explained it to you?” he said in the tone of abandoning hope. “It’s all so big and so complex. How could I have told you anything about a transcontinental railroad, unless you knew all the details and ramifications? How could I have explained to you my years of work, my... Oh, what’s the use? I’ve always been misunderstood and I should have been accustomed to it by now, only I thought that you were different and that I had a chance.”

“Jim, why did you marry me?”

He chuckled sadly. “That’s what everybody kept asking me. I didn’t think you’d ever ask it. Why? Because I love you.”

She wondered at how strange it was that this word—which was supposed to be the simplest in the human language, the word understood by all, the universal bond among men—conveyed to her no meaning whatever. She did not know what it was that it named in his mind.

“Nobody’s ever loved me,” he said. “There isn’t any love in the world. People don’t feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is time schedules and freight loads and money. I can’t live among those people. I’m very lonely. I’ve always longed to find understanding. Maybe I’m just a hopeless idealist, looking for the impossible.

Nobody will ever understand me.”

“Jim,” she said, with an odd little note of severity in her voice, “what I’ve struggled for all this time is to understand you.”

He dropped his hand in a motion of brushing her words aside, not offensively, but sadly. “I thought you could. You’re all I have. But maybe understanding is just not possible between human beings.”

“Why should it be impossible? Why don’t you tell me what it is that you want? Why don’t you help me to understand you?”

He sighed. “That’s it. That’s the trouble—your asking all those why’s. Your constant asking of a why for everything. What I’m talking about can’t be put into words. It can’t be named. It has to be felt.

Either you feel it or you don’t. It’s not a thing of the mind, but of the heart. Don’t you ever feel? Just feel, without asking all those questions? Can’t you understand me as a human being, not as if I were a scientific object in a laboratory? The great understanding that transcends our shabby words and helpless minds... No, I guess I shouldn’t look for it. But I’ll always seek and hope. You’re my last hope. You’re all I have.”

She stood at the wall, without moving.

“I need you,” he wailed softly. “I’m all alone. You’re not like the others. I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me? You’re all I have... ”

She stood without moving and the direction of her glance, lowered to look down at him, was the only form of recognition she gave him.

The things he said about his suffering were lies, she thought; but the suffering was real; he was a man torn by some continual anguish, which he seemed unable to tell her, but which, perhaps, she could learn to understand. She still owed him this much—she thought, with the grayness of a sense of duty—in payment for the position he had given her, which, perhaps, was all he had to give, she owed him an effort to understand him.

It was strange to feel, in the days that followed, that she had become a stranger to herself, a stranger who had nothing to want or to seek. In place of a love made by the brilliant fire of hero worship, she was left with the gnawing drabness of pity. In place of the men she had struggled to find, men who fought for their goals and refused to suffer—she was left with a man whose suffering was his only claim to value and his only offer in exchange for her life. But it made no difference to her any longer. The one who was she, had looked with eagerness at the turn of every corner ahead; the passive stranger who had taken her place, was like all the over groomed people around her, the people who said that they were adult because they did not try to think or to desire.

But the stranger was still haunted by a ghost who was herself, and the ghost had a mission to accomplish. She had to learn to understand the things that had destroyed her. She had to know, and she lived with a sense of ceaseless waiting. She had to know, even though she felt that the headlight was closer and in the moment of knowledge she would be struck by the wheels.

What do you want of me?—was the question that kept beating in her mind as a clue. What do you want of me?—she kept crying soundlessly, at dinner tables, in drawing rooms, on sleepless nights— crying it to Jim and those who seemed to share his secret, to Balph Eubank, to Dr. Simon Pritchett—what do you want of me? She did not ask it aloud; she knew that they would not answer. What do you want of me?—she asked, feeling as if she were running, but no way were open to escape. What do you want of me?—she asked, looking at the whole long torture of her marriage that had not lasted the full span of one year.

“What do you want of me?” she asked aloud—and saw that she was sitting at the table in her dining room, looking at Jim, at his feverish face, and at a drying stain of water on the table.

She did not know how long a span of silence had stretched between them, she was startled by her own voice and by the--question she had not intended to utter. She did not expect him to understand it, he had never seemed to understand much simpler queries—and she shook her head, struggling to recapture the reality of the present.

She was startled to see him looking at her with a touch of derision, as if he were mocking her estimate of his understanding.

“Love,” he answered.

She felt herself sagging with hopelessness, in the face of that answer which was at once so simple and so meaningless.

“You don’t love me,” he said accusingly. She did not answer. “You don’t love me or you wouldn’t ask such a question.”

“I did love you once,” she said dully, “but it wasn’t what you wanted. I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn’t real, any of it.”

His lower lip swelled a little in a faint, contemptuous thrust. “What a shabby idea of love!” he said.

“Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?”

“What a cheap shopkeeper’s attitude!”

She did not speak; she looked at him, her eyes stretched by a silent question.

“To be loved for!” he said, his voice grating with mockery and righteousness. “So you think that love is a matter of mathematics, of exchange, of weighing and measuring, like a pound of butter on a grocery counter? I don’t want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself—not for anything I do or have or say or think. For myself—not for my body or mind or words or works or actions.”

“But then... what is yourself?”

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask it.” His voice had a shrill note of nervousness, as if he were swaying dangerously between caution and some blindly heedless impulse. “You wouldn’t ask. You’d know. You’d feel it. Why do you always try to tag and label everything? Can’t you rise above those petty materialistic definitions? Don’t you ever feel—just feel?”

“Yes. Jim, I do,” she said, her voice low. “But I am trying not to, because... because what I feel is fear.”

“Of me?” he asked hopefully.

“No, not exactly. Not fear of what you can do to me, but of what you are.”

He dropped his eyelids with the swiftness of slamming a door—but she caught a flash of his eyes and the flash, incredibly, was terror.

“You’re not capable of love, you cheap little gold-digger!” he cried suddenly, in a tone stripped of all color but the desire to hurt. “Yes, I said gold-digger. There are many forms of it, other than greed for money, other and worse. You’re a gold-digger of the spirit. You didn’t marry me for my cash—but you married me for my ability or courage or whatever value it was that you set as the price of your love!”

“Do you want... love... to be... causeless?”

“Love is its own cause! Love is above causes and reasons. Love is blind. But you wouldn’t be capable of it. You have the mean, scheming, calculating little soul of a shopkeeper who trades, but never gives!

Love is a gift—a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What’s the generosity of loving a man for his virtues?

What do you give him? Nothing. It’s no more than cold justice. No more than he’s earned.”

Her eyes were dark with the dangerous intensity of glimpsing her goal. “You want it to be unearned,” she said, not in the tone of a question, but of a verdict.

“Oh, you don’t understand!”

“Yes, Jim, I do. That’s what you want—that’s what all of you really want—not money, not material benefits, not economic security, not any of the handouts you keep demanding.” She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.

“All of you welfare preachers—it’s not unearned money that you’re after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I’m a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers... it’s the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it would mean—the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything.

Without... the necessity... of being.”

“Shut up!” he screamed.

They looked at each other, both in terror, both feeling as if they were swaying on an edge which she could not and he would not name, both knowing that one more step would be fatal.

“What do you think you’re saying?” he asked in a tone of petty anger, which sounded almost benevolent by bringing them back into the realm of the normal, into the near-wholesomeness of nothing worse than a family quarrel. “What sort of metaphysical subject are you trying to deal with?”

“I don’t know...” she said wearily, dropping her head, as if some shape she had tried to capture had slipped once more out of her grasp. “I don’t know... It doesn’t seem possible...”

“You’d better not try to wade in way over your head or—” But he had to stop, because the butler entered, bringing the glittering ice bucket with the champagne ordered for celebration.

They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.

They remained silent, till the butler had gone. Taggart sat looking down at the bubbles, holding the stem of his glass between two limply casual fingers. Then his hand closed suddenly about the stem into an awkwardly convulsed fist and he raised it, not as one lifts a glass of champagne, but as one would lift a butcher knife.

“To Francisco d’Anconia!” he said.

She put her glass down. “No,” she answered.

“Drink it!” he screamed.

“No,” she answered, her voice like a drop of lead.

They held each other’s glances for a moment, the light playing on the golden liquid, not reaching their faces or eyes.

“Oh, go to hell!” he cried, leaping to his feet, flinging his glass to smash on the floor and rushing out of the room.

She sat at the table, not moving, for a long time, then rose slowly and pressed the bell.

She walked to her room, her steps unnaturally even, she opened the door of a closet, she reached for a suit and a pair of shoes, she took off the housecoat, moving with cautious precision, as if her life depended on not jarring anything about or within her. She held onto a single thought: that she had to get out of this house—just get out of it for a while, if only for the next hour—and then, later, she would be able to face all that had to be faced.

The lines were blurring on the paper before her and, raising her head, Dagny realized that it had long since grown dark.

She pushed the papers aside, unwilling to turn on the lamp, permitting herself the luxury of idleness and darkness. It cut her off from the city beyond the windows of her living room. The calendar in the distance said: August 5.

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad—a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, of that which had not happened, a sum of prevented catastrophes—not a task in the service of life, but only a race against death.

There had been times when an unsummoned vision—a sight of the valley—had seemed to rise before her, not as a sudden appearance, but as a constant, hidden presence that suddenly chose to assume an insistent reality. She had faced it, through moments of blinded stillness, in a contest between an unmoving decision and an unyielding pain, a pain to be fought by acknowledgment, by saying: All right, even this.

There had been mornings when, awakening with rays of sunlight on her face, she had thought that she must hurry to Hammond’s Market to get fresh eggs for breakfast; then, recapturing full consciousness, seeing the haze of New York beyond the window of her bedroom, she had felt a tearing stab, like a touch of death, the touch of rejecting reality. You knew it—she had told herself severely—you knew what it would be like when you made your choice. And dragging her body, like an unwilling weight, out of bed to face an unwelcome day, she would whisper: All right, even this.

The worst of the torture had been the moments when, walking down the street, she had caught a sudden glimpse of chestnut-gold, a glowing streak of hair among the heads of strangers, and had felt as if the city had vanished, as if nothing but the violent stillness within her were delaying the moment when she would rush to him and seize him; but that next moment had come as the sight of some meaningless face—and she had stood, not wishing to live through the following step, not wishing to generate the energy of living. She had tried to avoid such moments; she had tried to forbid herself to look; she had walked, keeping her eyes on the pavements. She had failed: by some will of their own, her eyes had kept leaping to every streak of gold.

She had kept the blinds raised on the windows of her office, remembering his promise, thinking only: If you are watching me, wherever you are... There were no buildings close to the height of her office, but she had looked at the distant towers, wondering which window was his observation post, wondering whether some invention of his own, some device of rays and lenses, permitted him to observe her every movement from some skyscraper a block or a mile away. She had sat at her desk, at her uncurtained windows, thinking: Just to know that you’re seeing me, even if I’m never to see you again.

And remembering it, now, in the darkness of her room, she leaped to her feet and snapped on the light.

Then she dropped her head for an instant, smiling in mirthless amusement at herself. She wondered whether her lighted windows, in the black immensity of the city, were a flare of distress, calling for his help—or a lighthouse still protecting the rest of the world.

The doorbell rang.

When she opened the door, she saw the silhouette of a girl with a faintly familiar face—and it took her a moment of startled astonishment to realize that it was Cherryl Taggart. Except for a formal exchange of greetings on a few chance encounters in the halls of the Taggart Building, they had not seen each other since the wedding.

Cherryl’s face was composed and unsmiling. “Would you permit me to speak to you”—she hesitated and ended on—“Miss Taggart?”

“Of course,” said Dagny gravely. “Come in.”

She sensed some desperate emergency in the unnatural calm of Cherryl’s manner; she became certain of it when she looked at the girl’s face in the light of the living room. “Sit down,” she said, but Cherryl remained standing.

“I came to pay a debt,” said Cherryl, her voice solemn with the effort to permit herself no sound of emotion. “I want to apologize for the things I said to you at my wedding. There’s no reason why you should forgive me, but it’s my place to tell you that I know I was insulting everything I admire and defending everything I despise. I know that admitting it now, doesn’t make up for it, and even coming here is only another presumption, there’s no reason why you should want to hear it, so I can’t even cancel the debt, I can only ask for a favor—that you let me say the things I want to say to you.”

Dagny’s shock of emotion, incredulous, warm and painful, was the wordless equivalent of the sentence: What a distance to travel in less than a year... ! She answered, the unsmiling earnestness of her voice like a hand extended in support, knowing that a smile would upset some precarious balance, “But it does make up for it, and I do want to hear it.”

“I know that it was you who ran Taggart Transcontinental. It was you who built the John Galt Line. It was you who had the mind and the courage that kept all of it alive. I suppose you thought that I married Jim for his money—as what shop girl wouldn’t have? But, you see, I married Jim because I... I thought that he was you. I thought that he was Taggart Transcontinental. Now I know that he’s”—she hesitated, then went on firmly, as if not to spare herself anything—“he’s some sort of vicious moocher, though I can’t understand of what kind or why. When I spoke to you at my wedding, I thought that I was defending greatness and attacking its enemy... but it was in reverse... it was in such horrible, unbelievable reverse!... So I wanted to tell you that I know the truth... not so much for your sake, I have no right to presume that you’d care, but... but for the sake of the things I loved.”

Dagny said slowly, “Of course I forgive it.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, and turned to go.

“Sit down.”

She shook her head. “That... that was all, Miss Taggart.”

Dagny allowed herself the first touch of a smile, no more than in the look of her eyes, as she said, “Cherryl, my name is Dagny.”

Cherryl’s answer was no more than a faint, tremulous crease of her mouth, as if, together, they had completed a single smile. “I...

I didn’t know whether I should—”

“We’re sisters, aren’t we?”

“No! Not through Jim!” It was an involuntary cry.

“No, through our own choice. Sit down, Cherryl.” The girl obeyed, struggling not to show the eagerness of her acceptance, not to grasp for support, not to break. “You’ve had a terrible time, haven’t you?”

“Yes... but that doesn’t matter... that’s my own problem... and my own fault.”

“I don’t think it was your own fault.”

Cherryl did not answer, then said suddenly, desperately, “Look... what I don’t want is charity.”

“Jim must have told you—and it’s true—that I never engage in charity.”

“Yes, he did... But what I mean is—”

“I know what you mean.”

“But there’s no reason why you should have to feel concern for me... I didn’t come here to complain and... and load another burden on your shoulders... That I happen to suffer, doesn’t give me a claim on you.”

“No, it doesn’t. But that you value all the things I value, does.”

“You mean... if you want to talk to me, it’s not alms? Not just because you feel sorry for me?”

“I feel terribly sorry for you, Cherryl, and I’d like to help you—not because you suffer, but because you haven’t deserved to suffer.”

“You mean, you wouldn’t be kind to anything weak or whining or rotten about me? Only to whatever you see in me that’s good?”

“Of course.”

Cherryl did not move her head, but she looked as if it were lifted—as if some bracing current were relaxing her features into that rare look which combines pain and dignity.

“It’s not alms, Cherryl. Don’t be afraid to speak to me.”

“It’s strange... You’re the first person I can talk to... and it feels so easy... yet I... I was afraid to speak to you. I wanted to ask your forgiveness long ago... ever since I learned the truth, I went as far as the door of your office, but I stopped and stood there in the hall and didn’t have the courage to go in... I didn’t intend to come here tonight. I went out only to... to think something over, and then, suddenly, I knew that I wanted to see you, that in the whole of the city this was the only place for me to go and the only thing still left for me to do.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“You know, Miss Tag—Dagny,” she said softly, in wonder, “you’re not as I expected you to be at all... They, Jim and his friends, they said you were hard and cold and unfeeling.”

“But it’s true, Cherryl. I am, in the sense they mean—only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?”

“No. They never do. They only sneer at me when I ask them what they mean by anything... about anything. What did they mean about you?”

“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that ‘to feel’ is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality. He means... What’s the matter?” she asked, seeing the abnormal intensity of the girl’s face.

“It’s... it’s something I’ve tried so hard to understand... for such a long time...”

“Well, observe that you never hear that accusation in defense of innocence, but always in defense of guilt. You never hear it said by a good person about those who fail to do him justice. But you always hear it said by a rotter about those who treat him as a rotter, those who don’t feel any sympathy for the evil he’s committed or for the pain he suffers as a consequence. Well, it’s true—that is what I do not feel. But those who feel it, feel nothing for any quality of human greatness, for any person or action that deserves admiration, approval, esteem. These are the things I feel. You’ll find that it’s one or the other. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

Ask yourself which, of the two, are the unfeeling persons. And then you’ll see what motive is the opposite of charity.”

“What?” she whispered.

“Justice, Cherryl.”

Cherryl shuddered suddenly and dropped her head. “Oh God!” she moaned. “If you knew what hell Jim has been giving me because I believed just what you said!” She raised her face in the sweep of another shudder, as if the things she had tried to control had broken through; the look in her eyes was terror. “Dagny,” she whispered, “Dagny, I’m afraid of them... of Jim and all the others... not afraid of something they’ll do... if it were that, I could escape... but afraid, as if there’s no way out... afraid of what they are and... and that they exist.”

Dagny came forward swiftly to sit on the arm of her chair and seize her shoulder in a steadying grasp. “Quiet, kid,” she said. “You’re wrong. You must never feel afraid of people in that way. You must never think that their existence is a reflection on yours—yet that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Yes... Yes, I feel that there’s no chance for me to exist, if they do... no chance, no room, no world I can cope with... I don’t want to feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it’s coming closer and I know I have no place to run... I can’t explain what it feels like, I can’t catch hold of it—and that’s part of the terror, that you can’t catch hold of anything—it’s as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion—an explosion is something hard and solid—but destroyed by... by some horrible kind of softening... as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds—and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo.”

“Cherryl... Cherryl, you poor kid, there have been centuries of philosophers plotting to turn the world into just that—to destroy people’s minds by making them believe that that’s what they’re seeing.

But you don’t have to accept it. You don’t have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is—say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“But... but nothing is, any more. Jim and his friends—they’re not. I don’t know what I’m looking at, when I’m among them, I don’t know what I’m hearing when they speak... it’s not real, any of it, it’s some ghastly sort of act that they’re all going through... and I don’t know what they’re after... Dagny! We’ve always been told that human beings have such a great power of knowledge, so much greater than animals, but I—I feel blinder than any animal right now, blinder and more helpless. An animal knows who are its friends and who are its enemies, and when to defend itself. It doesn’t expect a friend to step on it or to cut its throat. It doesn’t expect to be told that love is blind, that plunder is achievement, that gangsters are statesmen and that it’s great to break the spine of Hank Rearden!—oh God, what am I saying?”

“I know what you’re saying.”

“I mean, how am I to deal with people? I mean, if nothing held firm for the length of one hour—we couldn’t go on, could we? Well, I know that things are solid—but people? Dagny! They’re nothing and anything, they’re not beings, they’re only switches, just constant switches without any shape. But I have to live among them. How am I to do it?”

“Cherryl, what you’ve been struggling with is the greatest problem in history, the one that has caused ail of human suffering. You’ve understood much more than most people, who suffer and die, never knowing what killed them. I’ll help you to understand. It’s a big subject and a hard battle—but first, above all, don’t be afraid.”

The look on Cherryl’s face was an odd, wistful longing, as if, seeing Dagny from a great distance, she were straining and failing to come closer, “I wish I could wish to fight,” she said softly, “but I don’t. I don’t even want to win any longer. There’s one change that I don’t seem to have the strength to make. You see, I had never expected anything like my marriage to Jim. Then when it happened, I thought that life was much more wonderful than I had expected. And now to get used to the idea that life and people are much more horrible than anything I had imagined and that my marriage was not a glorious miracle, but some unspeakable kind of evil which I’m still afraid to learn fully—that is what I can’t force myself to take. I can’t get past it.” She glanced up suddenly. “Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?”

“By holding to just one rule.”

“Which?”

“To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind.”

“You’ve taken some terrible beatings... maybe worse than I did... worse than any of us... What held you through it?”

“The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.”

She saw a look of astonishment, of incredulous recognition on Cherryl’s face, as if the girl were struggling to recapture some sensation across a span of years. “Dagny”—her voice was a whisper—“that’s... that’s what I felt when I was a child... that’s what I seem to remember most about myself... that kind of feeling... and I never lost it, it’s there, it’s always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something that I must hide... I never had any name for it, but just now, when you said it, it struck me that that’s what it was... Dagny, to feel that way about your own life—is that good?”

“Cherryl, listen to me carefully: that feeling—with everything which it requires and implies—is the highest, noblest and only good on earth.”

“The reason I ask is because I... I wouldn’t have dared to think that. Somehow, people always made me feel as if they thought it was a sin... as if that were the thing in me which they resented and... and wanted to destroy.”

“It’s true. Some people do want to destroy it. And when you learn to understand their motive, you’ll know the darkest, ugliest and only evil in the world, but you’ll be safely out of its reach.”

Cherryl’s smile was like a feeble flicker struggling to retain its hold upon a few drops of fuel, to catch them, to flare up. “It’s the first time in months,” she whispered, “that I’ve felt as if... as if there’s still a chance.” She saw Dagny’s eyes watching her with attentive concern, and she added, “I’ll be all right... Let me get used to it—to you, to all the things you said. I think I’ll come to believe it... to believe that it’s real... and that Jim doesn’t matter.” She rose to her feet, as if trying to retain the moment of assurance.

Prompted by a sudden, causeless certainty, Dagny said sharply, “Cherryl, I don’t want you to go home tonight.”

“Oh no! I’m all right. I’m not afraid, that way. Not of going home.”

“Didn’t something happen there tonight?”

“No... not really... nothing worse than usual. It was just that I began to see things a little more clearly, that was all... I’m all right. I have to think, think harder than I ever did before... and then I’ll decide what I must do. May I—” She hesitated.

“Yes?”

“May I come back to talk to you again?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you, I... I’m very grateful to you.”

“Will you promise me that you’ll come back?”

“I promise.”

Dagny saw her walking off down the hall toward the elevator, saw the slump of her shoulders, then the effort that lifted them, saw the slender figure that seemed to sway then marshal all of its strength to remain erect. She looked like a plant with a broken stem, still held together by a single fiber, struggling to heal the breach, which one more gust of wind would finish.

Through the open door of his study, James Taggart had seen Cherryl cross the anteroom and walk out of the apartment. He had slammed his door and slumped down on the davenport, with patches of spilled champagne still soaking the cloth of his trousers, as if his own discomfort were a revenge upon his wife and upon a universe that would not provide him with the celebration he had wanted.

After a while, he leaped to his feet, tore off his coat and threw it across the room. He reached for a cigarette, but snapped it in half and flung it at a painting over the fireplace.

He noticed a vase of Venetian glass—a museum piece, centuries old, with an intricate system of blue and gold arteries twisting through its transparent body. He seized it and flung it at the wall; it burst into a rain of glass as thin as a shattered light bulb.

He had bought that vase for the satisfaction of thinking of all the connoisseurs who could not afford it. Now he experienced the satisfaction of a revenge upon the centuries which had prized it—and the satisfaction of thinking that there were millions of desperate families, any one of whom could have lived for a year on the price of that vase.

He kicked off his shoes, and fell back on the davenport, letting his stocking feet dangle in mid-air.

The sound of the doorbell startled him: it seemed to match his mood.

It was the kind of brusque, demanding, impatient snap of sound he would have produced if he were now jabbing his finger at someone’s doorbell.

He listened to the butler’s steps, promising himself the pleasure of refusing admittance to whoever was seeking it. In a moment, he heard the knock at his door and the butler entered to announce, “Mrs.

Rearden to see you, sir.”

“What?... Oh... Well! Have her come in!”

He swung his feet down to the floor, but made no other concession, and waited with half a smile of alerted curiosity, choosing not to rise until a moment after Lillian had entered the room.

She wore a wine-colored dinner gown, an imitation of an Empire traveling suit, with a miniature double-breasted jacket gripping her high waistline over the long sweep of the skirt, and a small hat clinging to one ear, with a feather sweeping down to curl under her chin. She entered with a brusque, unrhythmical motion, the train of her dress and the feather of her hat swirling, then flapping against her legs and throat, like pennants signaling nervousness.

“Lillian, my dear, am I to be flattered, delighted or just plain flabbergasted?”

“Oh, don’t make a fuss about it! I had to see you, and it had to be immediately, that’s all.”

The impatient tone, the peremptory movement with which she sat down were a confession of weakness: by the rules of their unwritten language, one did not assume a demanding manner unless one were seeking a favor and had no value—no threat—to barter.

“Why didn’t you stay at the Gonzales reception?” she asked, her casual smile failing to hide the tone of irritation. “I dropped in on them after dinner, just to catch hold of you—but they said you hadn’t been feeling well and had gone home.”

He crossed the room and picked up a cigarette, for the pleasure of padding in his stocking feet past the formal elegance of her costume.

“I was bored,” he answered.

“I can’t stand them,” she said, with a little shudder; he glanced at her in astonishment: the words sounded involuntary and sincere. “I can’t stand Senor Gonzales and that whore he’s got himself for a wife.

It’s disgusting that they’ve become so fashionable, they and their parties. I don’t feel like going anywhere any longer. It’s not the same style any more, not the same spirit. I haven’t run into Balph Eubank for months, or Dr. Pritchett, or any of the boys. And all those new faces that look like butcher’s assistants! After all, our crowd were gentlemen.”

“Yeah,” he said reflectively. “Yeah, there’s some funny kind of difference. It’s like on the railroad, too: I could get along with Gem Weatherby, he was civilized, but Cuffy Meigs—that’s something else again, that’s...” He stopped abruptly.

“It’s perfectly preposterous,” she said, in the tone of a challenge to the space at large. “They can’t get away with it.”

She did not explain “who” or “with what.” He knew what she meant. Through a moment of silence, they looked as if they were clinging to each other for reassurance.

In the next moment, he was thinking with pleasurable amusement that Lillian was beginning to show her age. The deep burgundy color of her gown was unbecoming, it seemed to draw a purplish tinge out of her skin, a tinge that gathered, like twilight, in the small gullies of her face, softening her flesh to a texture of tired slackness, changing her look of bright mockery into a look of stale malice.

He saw her studying him, smiling and saying crisply, with the smile as license for insult.

“You are unwell, aren’t you, Jim? You look like a disorganized stable boy.”

He chuckled. “I can afford it.”

“I know it, darling. You’re one of the most powerful men in New York City.” She added, “It’s a good joke on New York City.”

“It is.”

“I concede that you’re in a position to do anything. That’s why I had to see you.” She added a small, grunt like sound of amusement, to dilute her statement’s frankness.

“Good,” he said, his voice comfortable and noncommittal.

“I had to come here, because I thought it best, in this particular matter, not to be seen together in public.”

“That is always wise.”

“I seem to remember having been useful to you in the past.”

“In the past—yes.”

“I am sure that I can count on you.”

“Of course—only isn’t that an old-fashioned, unphilosophical remark? How can we ever be sure of anything?”

“Jim,” she snapped suddenly, “you’ve got to help me!”

“My dear, I’m at your disposal, I’d do anything to help you,” he answered, the rules of their language requiring that any open statement be answered by a blatant lie. Lillian was slipping, he thought—and he experienced the pleasure of dealing with an inadequate adversary.

She was neglecting, he noted, even the perfection of her particular trademark: her grooming. A few strands were escaping from the drilled waves of her hair—her nails, matching her gown, were the deep shade of coagulated blood, which made it easy to notice the chipped polish at their tips—and against the broad, smooth, creamy expanse of her skin in the low, square cut of her gown, he observed the tiny glitter of a safety pin holding the strap of her slip.

“You’ve got to prevent it!” she said, in the belligerent tone of a plea disguised as a command. “You’ve got to stop it!”

“Really? What?”

“My divorce.”

“Oh... !” His features dropped into sudden earnestness.

“You know that he’s going to divorce me, don’t you?”

“I’ve heard some rumors about it.”

“It’s set for next month. And when I say set, that’s just what I mean.

Oh, it’s cost him plenty—but he’s bought the judge, the clerks, the bailiffs, their backers, their backers’ backers, a few legislators, half a dozen administrators—he’s bought the whole legal process, like a private thoroughfare, and there’s no single crossroad left for me to squeeze through to stop it!”

“I see.”

“You know, of course, what made him start divorce proceedings?”

“I can guess.”

“And I did it as a favor to you!” Her voice was growing anxiously shrill. “I told you about your sister in order to let you get that Gift Certificate for your friends, which—”

“I swear I don’t know who let it out!” he cried hastily. “Only a very few at the top knew that you’d been our informer, and I’m sure nobody would dare mention—”

“Oh, I’m sure nobody did. He’d have the brains to guess it, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Well, then you knew that you were taking a chance.”

“I didn’t think he’d go that far. I didn’t think he’d ever divorce me.

I didn’t—”

He chuckled suddenly, with a glance of astonishing perceptiveness.

“You didn’t think that guilt is a rope that wears thin, did you, Lillian?”

She looked at him, startled, then answered stonily, “I don’t think it does.”

“It does, my dear—for men such as your husband.”

“I don’t want him to divorce me!” It was a sudden scream. “I don’t want to let him go free! I won’t permit it! I won’t let the whole of my life be a total failure!” She stopped abruptly, as if she had admitted too much.

He was chuckling softly, nodding his head with a slow movement that had an air of intelligence, almost of dignity, by signifying a complete understanding.

“I mean... after all, he’s my husband,” she said defensively.

“Yes, Lillian, yes, I know.”

“Do you know what he’s planning? He’s going to get the decree and he’s going to cut me off without a penny—no settlement, no alimony, nothing! He’s going to have the last word. Don’t you see? If he gets away with it, then... then the Gift Certificate was no victory for me at all!”

“Yes, my dear, I see.”

“And besides... It’s preposterous that I should have to think of it, but what am I going to live on? The little money I had of my own is worth nothing nowadays. It’s mainly stock in factories of my father’s time, that have closed long ago. What am I going to do?”

“But, Lillian,” he said softly, “I thought you had no concern for money or for any material rewards.”

“You don’t understand! I’m not talking about money—I’m talking about poverty! Real, stinking, hall-bedroom poverty! That’s out of bounds for any civilized person! I—I to have to worry about food and rent?”

He was watching her with a faint smile; for once, his soft, aging face seemed tightened into a look of wisdom; he was discovering the pleasure of full perception—in a reality which he could permit himself to perceive.

“Jim, you’ve got to help me! My lawyer is powerless. I’ve spent the little I had, on him and on his investigators, friends and fixers—but all they could do for me was find out that they can do nothing. My lawyer gave me his final report this afternoon. He told me bluntly that I haven’t a chance. I don’t seem to know anyone who can help against a setup of this kind. I had counted on Bertram Scudder, but... well, you know what happened to Bertram. And that, too, was because I had tried to help you. You pulled yourself out of that one. Jim, you’re the only person who can pull me out now. You’ve got your gopher-hole pipe line straight up to the top. You can reach the big boys. Slip a word to your friends to slip a word to their friends. One word from Wesley would do it. Have them order that divorce decree to be refused. Just have it be refused.”

He shook his head slowly, almost compassionately, like a tired professional at an overzealous amateur. “It can’t be done, Lillian,” he said firmly. “I’d like to do it—for the same reasons as yours—and I think you know it. But whatever power I have is not enough in this case.”

She was looking at him, her eyes dark with an odd, lifeless stillness; when she spoke, the motion of her lips was twisted by so evil a contempt that he did not dare identify it beyond knowing that it embraced them both; she said, “I know that you’d like to do it.”

He felt no desire to pretend; oddly, for the first time, for this one chance, truth seemed much more pleasurable—truth, for once, serving his particular kind of enjoyment. “I think you know that it can’t be done,” he said. “Nobody does favors nowadays, if there’s nothing to gain in return. And the stakes are getting higher and higher. The gopher holes, as you called them, are so complex, so twisted and intertwisted that everybody has something on everybody else, and nobody dares move because he can’t tell who’ll crack which way or when. So he’ll move only when he has to, when the stakes are life or death—and that’s practically the only kind of stakes we’re playing for now. Well, what’s your private life to any of those boys? That you’d like to hold your husband—what’s in it for them, one way or another? And my personal stock-in-trade—well, there’s nothing I could offer them at the moment in exchange for trying to blast a whole court clique out of a highly profitable deal. Besides, right now, the top boys wouldn’t do it at any price. They have to be mighty careful of your husband—he’s the man who’s safe from them right now—ever since that radio broadcast of my sister’s.”

“You asked me to force her to speak on that broadcast!”

“I know, Lillian. We lost, both of us, that time. And we lose, both of us, now.”

“Yes,” she said, with the same darkness of contempt in her eyes, “both of us.”

It was the contempt that pleased him; it was the strange, heedless, unfamiliar pleasure of knowing that this woman saw him as he was, yet remained held by his presence, remained and leaned back in her chair, as if declaring her bondage.

“You’re a wonderful person, Jim,” she said. It had the sound of damnation. Yet it was a tribute, and she meant it as such, and his pleasure came from the knowledge that they were in a realm where damnation was value.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “you’re wrong about those butcher’s assistants, like Gonzales. They have their uses. Have you ever liked Francisco d’Anconia?”

“I can’t stand him.”

“Well, do you know the real purpose of that cocktail-swilling occasion staged by Senor Gonzales tonight? It was to celebrate the agreement to nationalize d’Anconia Copper in about a month.”

She looked at him for a moment, the corners of her lips lifting slowly into a smile. “He was your friend, wasn’t he?”

Her voice had a tone he had never earned before, the tone of an emotion which he had drawn from people only by fraud, but which now, for the first time, was granted with full awareness to the real, the actual nature of his deed: a tone of admiration.

Suddenly, he knew that this was the goal of his restless hours, this was the pleasure he had despaired of finding, this was the celebration he had wanted.

“Let’s have a drink, Lil.” he said.

Pouring the liquor, he glanced at her across the room, as she lay stretched limply in her chair. “Let him get his divorce,” he said, “He won’t have the last word. They will. The butcher’s assistants. Senor Gonzales and Cuffy Meigs.”

She did not answer. When he approached, she took the glass from him with a sloppily indifferent sweep of her hand. She drank, not in the manner of a social gesture, but like a lonely drinker in a saloon—for the physical sake of the liquor.

He sat down on the arm of the davenport, improperly close to her, and sipped his drink, watching her face. After a while, he asked, “What does he think of me?”

The question did not seem to astonish her. “He thinks you’re a fool,” she answered. “He thinks life’s too short to have to notice your existence.”

“He’d notice it, if—” He stopped.

“—if you bashed him over the head with a club? I’m not too sure.

He’d merely blame himself for not having moved out of the club’s reach. Still, that would be your only chance.”

She shifted her body, sliding lower in the armchair, stomach forward, as if relaxation were ugliness, as if she were granting him the kind of intimacy that required no poise and no respect.

“That was the first thing I noticed about him,” she said, “when I met him for the first time: that he was not afraid. He looked as if he felt certain that there was nothing any of us could do to him—so certain that he didn’t even know the issue or the nature of what he felt.”

“How long since you saw him last?”

“Three months. I haven’t seen him since... since the Gift Certificate...”

“I saw him at an industrial meeting two weeks ago. He still looks that way—only more so. Now, he looks as if he knows it.” He added, “You have failed, Lillian.”

She did not answer. She pushed her hat off with the back of her hand; it rolled down to the carpet, its feather curling like a question mark. “I remember the first time I saw his mills,” she said. “His mills!

You can’t imagine what he felt about them. You wouldn’t know the kind of intellectual arrogance it takes to feel as if anything pertaining to him, anything he touched, were made sacred by the touch. His mills, his Metal, his money, his bed, his wife!” She glanced up at him, a small flicker piercing the lethargic emptiness of her eyes. “He never noticed your existence. He did notice mine. I’m still Mrs. Rearden—at least for another month.”

“Yes...” he said, looking down at her with a sudden, new interest.

“Mrs. Rearden!” she chuckled. “You wouldn’t know what that meant to him. No feudal lord ever felt or demanded such reverence for the title of his wife—or held it as such a symbol of honor. Of his unbending, untouchable, inviolate, stainless honor!” She waved her hand in a vague motion, indicating the length of her sprawled body. “Caesar’s wife!” she chuckled. “Do you remember what she was supposed to be?

No, you wouldn’t. She was supposed to be above reproach.”

He was staring down at her with the heavy, blind stare of impotent hatred—a hatred of which she was the sudden symbol, not the object.

“He didn’t like it when his Metal was thrown into common, public use, for any chance passer-by to make... did he?”

“No, he didn’t.”

His words were blurring a little, as if weighted with drops of the liquor he had swallowed: “Don’t tell me that you helped us to get that Gift Certificate as a favor to me and that you gained nothing... I know why you did it.”

“You knew it at the time.”

“Sure. That’s why I like you, Lillian.”

His eyes kept coming back to the low cut of her gown. It was not the smooth skin that attracted his glance, not the exposed rise of her breasts, but the fraud of the safety pin beyond the edge.

“I’d like to see him beaten,” he said. “I’d like to hear him scream with pain, just once.”

“You won’t, Jimmy.”

“Why does he think he’s better than the rest of us—he and that sister of mine?”

She chuckled. He rose as if she had slapped him. He went to the bar and poured himself another drink, not offering to refill her glass.

She was speaking into space, staring past him. “He did notice my existence—even though I can’t lay railroad tracks for him and erect bridges to the glory of his Metal. I can’t build his mills—but I can destroy them. I can’t produce his Metal—but I can take it away from him. I can’t bring men down to their knees in admiration—but I can bring them down to their knees.”

“Shut up!” he screamed in terror, as if she were coming too close to that fogbound alley which had to remain unseen.

She glanced up at his face. “You’re such a coward, Jim.”

“Why don’t you get drunk?” he snapped, sticking his unfinished drink at her mouth, as if he wanted to strike her.

Her fingers half-closed limply about the glass, and she drank, spilling the liquor down her chin, her breast and her gown.

“Oh hell, Lillian, you’re a mess!” he said and, not troubling to reach for his handkerchief, he stretched out his hand to wipe the liquor with the flat of his palm. His fingers slipped under the gown’s neckline, closing over her breast, his breath catching in a sudden gulp, like a hiccough. His eyelids were drawing closed, but he caught a glimpse of her face leaning back unresistingly, her mouth swollen with revulsion.

When he reached for her mouth, her arms embraced him obediently and her mouth responded, but the response was just a pressure, not a kiss.

He raised his head to glance at her face. Her teeth were bared in a smile, but she was staring past him, as if mocking some invisible presence, her smile lifeless, yet loud with malice, like the grin of a fleshless skull.

He jerked her closer, to stifle the sight and his own shudder. His hands were going through the automatic motions of intimacy—and she complied, but in a manner that made him feel as if the beats of her arteries under his touch were snickering giggles. They were both performing an expected routine, a routine invented by someone and imposed upon them, performing it in mockery, in hatred, in defiling parody on its inventors.

He felt a sightless, heedless fury, part-horror, part-pleasure—the horror of committing an act he would never dare confess to anyone—the pleasure of committing it in blasphemous defiance of those to whom he would not dare confess it. He was himself!—the only conscious part of his rage seemed to be screaming to him—he was, at last, himself!

They did not speak. They knew each other’s motive. Only two words were pronounced between them. “Mrs. Rearden,” he said.

They did not look at each other when he pushed her into his bedroom and onto his bed, falling against her body, as against a soft stuffed object. Their faces had a look of secrecy, the look of partners in guilt, the furtive, smutty look of children defiling someone’s clean fence by chalking sneaky scratches intended as symbols of obscenity.

Afterward, it did not disappoint him that what he had possessed was an inanimate body without resistance or response. It was not a woman that he had wanted to possess. It was not an act in celebration of life that he had wanted to perform—but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.

Cherryl unlocked the door and slipped in quietly, almost surreptitiously, as if hoping not to be seen or to see the place which was her home. The sense of Dagny’s presence—of Dagny’s world—had supported her on her way back, but when she entered her own apartment the walls seemed to swallow her again into the suffocation of a trap.

The apartment was silent; a wedge of light cut across the anteroom from a door left half-open. She dragged herself mechanically in the direction of her room. Then she stopped.

The open band of light was the door of Jim’s study, and on the illuminated strip of its carpet she saw a woman’s hat with a feather stirring faintly in a draft.

She took a step forward. The room was empty, she saw two glasses, one on a table, the other on the floor, and a woman’s purse lying on the seat of an armchair. She stood, in unexacting stupor, until she heard the muffled drawl of two voices behind the door of Jim’s bedroom; she could not distinguish the words, only the quality of the sounds: Jim’s voice had a tone of irritation, the woman’s—of contempt.

Then she found herself in her own room, fumbling frantically to lock her door. She had been flung here by the blind panic of escape, as if it were she who had to hide, she who had to run from the ugliness of being seen in the act of seeing them—a panic made of revulsion, of pity, of embarrassment, of that mental chastity which recoils from confronting a man with the unanswerable proof of his evil.

She stood in the middle of her room, unable to grasp what action was now possible to her. Then her knees gave way, folding gently, she found herself sitting on the floor and she stayed there, staring at the carpet, shaking.

It was neither anger nor jealousy nor indignation, but the blank horror of dealing with the grotesquely senseless. It was the knowledge that neither their marriage nor his love for her nor his insistence on holding her nor his love for that other woman nor this gratuitous adultery had any meaning whatever, that there was no shred of sense in any of it and no use to grope for explanations. She had always thought of evil as purposeful, as a means to some end; what she was seeing now was evil for evil’s sake.

She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard their steps and voices, then the sound of the front door closing. She got up, with no purpose in mind, but impelled by some instinct from the past, as if acting in a vacuum where honesty was not relevant any longer, but knowing no other way to act.

She met Jim in the anteroom. For a moment, they looked at each other as if neither could believe the other’s reality.

“When did you come back?” he snapped. “How long have you been home?”

“I don’t know...”

He was looking at her face. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Jim, I—” She struggled, gave up and waved her hand toward his bedroom. “Jim, I know.”

“What do you know?”

“You were there... with a woman.”

His first action was to push her into his study and slam the door, as if to hide them both, he could no longer say from whom. An unadmitted rage was boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him of his triumph, that he would not surrender to her his new enjoyment.

“Sure!” he screamed. “So what? What are you going to do about it?”

She stared at him blankly.

“Sure! I was there with a woman! That’s what I did, because that’s what I felt like doing! Do you think you’re going to scare me with your gasps, your stares, your whimpering virtue?” He snapped his fingers.

“That for your opinion! I don’t give a hoot in hell about your opinion!

Take it and like it!” It was her white, defenseless face that drove him on, lashing him into a state of pleasure, the pleasure of feeling as if his words were blows disfiguring a human face. “Do you think you’re going to make me hide? I’m sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction! Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody?

I’ll do as I please, and you’ll keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public, like everybody else, and stop demanding that I act in my own home!—nobody is virtuous in his own home, the show is only for company!—but if you expect me to mean it—to mean it, you damn little fool!—you’d better grow up in a hurry!”

It was not her face that he was seeing, it was the face of the man at whom he wanted and would never be able to throw his deed of this night—but she had always stood as the worshipper, the defender, the agent of that man in his eyes, he had married her for it, so she could serve his purpose now, and he screamed, “Do you know who she was, the woman I laid? It was—”

“No!” she cried. “Jim! I don’t have to know it!”

“It was Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Hank Rearden!”

She stepped back. He felt a brief flash of terror—because she was looking at him as if she were seeing that which had to remain unadmitted to himself. She asked, in a dead voice that had the incongruous sound of common sense, “I suppose you will now want us to get divorced?”

He burst out laughing. “You goddamn fool! You still mean it! You still want it big and pure? I wouldn’t think of divorcing you—and don’t go imagining that I’ll let you divorce me! You think it’s as important as that? Listen, you fool, there isn’t a husband who doesn’t sleep with other women and there isn’t a wife who doesn’t know it, but they don’t talk about it! I’ll lay anybody I please, and you go and do the same, like all those bitches, and keep your mouth shut!”

He saw the sudden, startling sight of a look of hard, unclouded, unfeeling, almost inhuman intelligence in her eyes. “Jim, if I were the kind who did or would, you wouldn’t have married me.”

“No. I wouldn’t have.”

“Why did you marry me?”

He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. “Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little guttersnipe, who’d never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you’d love me! I thought you’d know that you had to love me!”

“As you are?”

“Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!”

“You loved me... because I was worthless?”

“Well, what did you think you were?”

“You loved me for being rotten?”

“What else did you have to offer? But you didn’t have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security—what security is there in being loved for one’s virtues? The competition’s wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I—I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity—and that’s safe, you’d have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self—everybody’s self is a gutter—but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!”

“You wanted me to... accept your love... as alms?”

“Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!”

“I... tried... to deserve it.”

“Of what use would you be to me, if you had?”

“You didn’t want me to?”

“Oh, you goddamn fool!”

“You didn’t want me to improve? You didn’t want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?”

“Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?”

“You wanted it to be alms... for both of us and from both?

You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?”

“Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper!

Yes!”

“You chose me because I was worthless?”

“Yes!”

“You’re lying, Jim.”

His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.

“Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling—didn’t you?”

“Yes!” he cried.

Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal—and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact—she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.

“What’s the matter with you?” he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.

She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: “You... you’re a killer... for the sake of killing...”

It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.

She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.

He stood motionless—and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.

She moved first. She sprang to her feet—and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment—he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.

She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.

After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections.

She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.

She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?—she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions, chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people’s eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand—and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with which one could not live.

Why are you doing it to me?—she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you’re good—some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won’t want to be good any longer—But you will—I don’t have to—You will—I can’t bear it—You will.

She shuddered and walked faster—but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city—it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of blood—and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose, she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2 and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.

Then I won’t!—she screamed and whirled around and went running back along the street—but it seemed to her that in the black sky, grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its changing faces, and its face was Jim’s and her childhood preacher’s and the woman social worker’s from the personnel department of the five-and-ten—and the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest, people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always work, so we’re safe and you have no choice.

She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a quiet street, past the glass doorways where lights were burning in the carpeted lobbies of luxurious buildings. She noticed that she was limping, and saw that the heel of her pump was loose; she had broken it somewhere in her blank span of running.

From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.

Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny—but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.

There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on—I can’t stand still, nor move much longer—I can neither work nor rest—I can neither surrender nor fight—but this... this is what they want of me, this is where they want me—neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.

She plunged into the darkness behind a corner, shrinking in dread from any human figure. No, she thought, they’re not evil, not all people... they’re only their own first victims, but they all believe in Jim’s creed, and I can’t deal with them, once I know it... and if I spoke to them, they would try to grant me their good will, but I’d know what it is that they hold as the good and I would see death staring out of their eyes.

The sidewalk had shrunk to a broken strip, and splashes of garbage ran over from the cans at the stoops of crumbling houses. Beyond the dusty glow of a saloon, she saw a lighted sign “Young Women’s Rest Club” above a locked door.

She knew the institutions of that kind and the women who ran them, the women who said that theirs was the job of helping sufferers.

If she went in—she thought, stumbling past—if she faced them and begged them for help, “What is your guilt?” they would ask her. “Drink? Dope? Pregnancy? Shoplifting?”

She would answer, “I have no guilt, I am innocent, but I’m—”

“Sorry. We have no concern for the pain of the innocent.”

She ran. She stopped, regaining her eyesight, on the corner of a long, wide street. The buildings and pavements merged with the sky—and two lines of green lights hung in open space, going off into an endless distance, as if stretching into other towns and oceans and foreign lands, to encircle the earth. The green glow had a look of serenity, like an inviting, unlimited path open to confident travel. Then the lights switched to red, dropping heavily lower, turning from sharp circles into foggy smears, into a warning of unlimited danger. She stood and watched a giant truck go by, its enormous wheels crushing one more layer of shiny polish into the flattened cobbles of the street.

The lights went back to the green of safety—but she stood trembling, unable to move. That’s how it works for the travel of one’s body, she thought, but what have they done to the traffic of the soul? They have set the signals in reverse—and the road is safe when the lights are the red of evil—but when the lights are the green of virtue, promising that yours is the right-of-way, you venture forth and are ground by the wheels. All over the world, she thought—those inverted lights go reaching into every land, they go on, encircling the earth. And the earth is littered with mangled cripples, who don’t know what has hit them or why, who crawl as best they can on their crushed limbs through their lightless days, with no answer save that pain is the core of existence—and the traffic cops of morality chortle and tell them that man, by his nature, is unable to walk.

These were not words in her mind, these were the words which would have named, had she had the power to find them, what she knew only as a sudden fury that made her beat her fists in futile horror against the iron post of the traffic light beside her, against the hollow tube where the hoarse, rusty chuckle of a relentless mechanism went grating on and on.

She could not smash it with her fists, she could not batter one by one all the posts of the street stretching off beyond eyesight—as she could not smash that creed from the souls of the men she would encounter, one by one. She could not deal with people any longer, she could not take the paths they took—but what could she say to them, she who had no words to name the thing she knew and no voice that people would hear? What could she tell them? How could she reach them all?

Where were the men who could have spoken?

These were not words in her mind, these were only the blows of her fists against metal—then she saw herself suddenly, battering her knuckles to blood against an immovable post, and the sight made her shudder—and she stumbled away. She went on, seeing nothing around her, feeling trapped in a maze with no exit.

No exit—her shreds of awareness were saying, beating it into the pavements in the sound of her steps—no exit... no refuge... no signals... no way to tell destruction from safety, or enemy from friend... Like that dog she had heard about, she thought... somebody’s dog in somebody’s laboratory... the dog who got his signals switched on him, and saw no way to tell satisfaction from torture, saw food changed to beatings and beatings to food, saw his eyes and ears deceiving him and his judgment futile and his consciousness impotent in a shifting, swimming, shapeless world—and gave up, refusing to eat at that price or to live in a world of that kind... No!—was the only conscious word in her brain—no!—no!—no!—not your way, not your world—even if this “no” is all that’s to be left of mine!

It was in the darkest hour of the night, in an alley among wharfs and warehouses that the social worker saw her. The social worker was a woman whose gray face and gray coat blended with the walls of the district. She saw a young girl wearing a suit too smart and expensive for the neighborhood, with no hat, no purse, with a broken heel, disheveled hair and a bruise at the corner of her mouth, a girl staggering blindly, not knowing sidewalks from pavements. The street was only a narrow crack between the sheer, blank walls of storage structures, but a ray of light fell through a fog dank with the odor of rotting water; a stone parapet ended the street on the edge of a vast black hole merging river and sky.

The social worker approached her and asked severely, “Are you in trouble?”—and saw one wary eye, the other hidden by a lock of hair, and the face of a wild creature who has forgotten the sound of human voices, but listens as to a distant echo, with suspicion, yet almost with hope.

The social worker seized her arm. “It’s a disgrace to come to such a state... if you society girls had something to do besides indulging your desires and chasing pleasures, you wouldn’t be wandering, drunk as a tramp, at this hour of the night... if you stopped living for your own enjoyment, stopped thinking of yourself and found some higher—”

Then the girl screamed—and the scream went beating against the blank walls of the street as in a chamber of torture, an animal scream of terror. She tore her arm loose and sprang back, then screamed in articulate sounds: “No! No! Not your kind of world!”

Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river—and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.

CHAPTER V THEIR BROTHERS’ KEEPERS

On the morning of September 2, a copper wire broke in California, between two telephone poles by the track of the Pacific branch line of Taggart Transcontinental.

A slow, thin rain had been falling since midnight, and there had been no sunrise, only a gray light seeping through a soggy sky—and the brilliant raindrops hanging on the telephone wires had been the only sparks glittering against the chalk of the clouds, the lead of the ocean and the steel of the oil derricks descending as lone bristles down a desolate hillside. The wires had been worn by more rains and years than they had been intended to carry; one of them had kept sagging, through the hours of that morning, under the fragile load of raindrops; then its one last drop had grown on the wire’s curve and had hung like a crystal bead, gathering the weight of many seconds; the bead and the wire had given up together and, as soundless as the fall of tears, the wire had broken and fallen with the fall of the bead.

The men at the Division Headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental avoided looking at one another, when the break of the telephone line was discovered and reported. They made statements painfully miscalculated to seem to refer to the problem, yet to state nothing, none fooling the others. They knew that copper wire was a vanishing commodity, more precious than gold or honor; they knew that the division storekeeper had sold their stock of wire weeks ago, to unknown dealers who came by night and were not businessmen in the daytime, but only men who had friends in Sacramento and in Washington—just as the storekeeper, recently appointed to the division, had a friend in New York, named Cuffy Meigs, about whom one asked no questions. They knew that the man who would now assume the responsibility of ordering repairs and initiating the action which would lead to the discovery that the repairs could not be made, would incur retaliation from unknown enemies, that his fellow workers would become mysteriously silent and would not testify to help him, that he would prove nothing, and if he attempted to do his job, it would not be his any longer. They did not know what was safe or dangerous these days, when the guilty were not punished, but the accusers were; and, like animals, they knew that immobility was the only protection when in doubt and in danger. They remained immobile; they spoke about the appropriate procedure of sending reports to the appropriate authorities on the appropriate dates.

A young roadmaster walked out of the room and out of the headquarters building to the safety of a telephone booth in a drugstore and, at his own expense, ignoring the continent and the tiers of appropriate executives between, he telephoned Dagny Taggart in New York.

She received the call in her brother’s office, interrupting an emergency conference. The young roadmaster told her only that the telephone line was broken and that there was no wire to repair it; he said nothing else and he did not explain why he had found it necessary to call her in person. She did not question him; she understood. “Thank you,” was all that she answered.

An emergency file in her office kept a record of all the crucial materials still on hand, on every division of Taggart Transcontinental.

Like the file of a bankrupt, it kept registering losses, while the rare additions of new supplies seemed like the malicious chuckles of some tormentor throwing crumbs at a starving continent. She looked through the file, closed it, sighed and said, “Montana, Eddie. Phone the Montana Line to ship half their stock of wire to California. Montana might be able to last without it—for another week.” And as Eddie Willers was about to protest, she added, “Oil, Eddie. California is one of the last producers of oil left in the country. We don’t dare lose the Pacific Line.” Then she went back to the conference in her brother’s office.

“Copper wire?” said James Taggart, with an odd glance that went from her face to the city beyond the window. “In a very short while, we won’t have any trouble about copper.”

“Why?” she asked, but he did not answer. There was nothing special to see beyond the window, only the clear sky of a sunny day, the quiet light of early afternoon on the roofs of the city and, above them, the page of the calendar, saying: September 2.

She did not know why he had insisted on holding this conference in his own office, why he had insisted on speaking to her alone, which he had always tried to avoid, or why he kept glancing at his wrist watch.

“Things are, it seems to me, going wrong,” he said. “Something has to be done. There appears to exist a state of dislocation and confusion tending toward an uncoordinated, unbalanced policy. What I mean is, there’s a tremendous national demand for transportation, yet we’re losing money. It seems to me—”

She sat looking at the ancestral map of Taggart Transcontinental on the wall of his office, at the red arteries winding across a yellowed continent. There had been a time when the railroad was called the blood system of the nation, and the stream of trains had been like a living circuit of blood, bringing growth and wealth to every patch of wilderness it touched. Now it was still like a stream of blood, but like the one-way stream that runs from a wound, draining the last of a body’s sustenance and life. One-way traffic—she thought indifferently—consumers’ traffic.

There was Train Number 193, she thought. Six weeks ago, Train Number 193 had been sent with a load of steel, not to Faulkton, Nebraska, where the Spencer Machine Tool Company, the best machine tool concern still in existence, had been idle for two weeks, waiting for the shipment—but to Sand Creek, Illinois, where Confederated Machines had been wallowing in debt for over a year, producing unreliable goods at unpredictable times. The steel had been allocated by a directive which explained that the Spencer Machine Tool Company was a rich concern, able to wait, while Confederated Machines was bankrupt and could not be allowed to collapse, being the sole source of livelihood of the community of Sand Creek, Illinois. The Spencer Machine Tool Company had closed a month ago. Confederated Machines had closed two weeks later.

The people of Sand Creek, Illinois, had been placed on national relief, but no food could be found for them in the empty granaries of the nation at the frantic call of the moment—so the seed grain of the farmers of Nebraska had been seized by order of the Unification Board—and Train Number 194 had carried the unplanted harvest and the future of the people of Nebraska to be consumed by the people of Illinois. “In this enlightened age,” Eugene Lawson had said in a radio broadcast, “we have come, at last, to realize that each one of us is his brother’s keeper.”

“In a precarious period of emergency, like the present,” James Taggart was saying, while she looked at the map, “it is dangerous to find ourselves forced to miss pay days and accumulate wage arrears on some of our divisions, a temporary condition, of course, but—”

She chuckled. “The Railroad Unification Plan isn’t working, is it, Jim?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re to receive a big cut of the Atlantic Southern’s gross income, out of the common pool at the end of the year—only there won’t be any gross income left for the pool to seize, will there?”

“That’s not true! It’s just that the bankers are sabotaging the Plan.

Those bastards—who used to give us loans in the old days, with no security at all except our own railroad—now refuse to let me have a few measly hundred-thousands, on short term, just to take care of a few payrolls, when I have the entire plant of all the railroads of the country to offer them as security for my loan!”

She chuckled.

“We couldn’t help it!” he cried. “It’s not the fault of the Plan that some people refuse to carry their fair share of our burdens!”

“Jim, was this all you wanted to tell me? If it is, I’ll go. I have work to do.”

His eyes shot to his wrist watch. “No, no, that’s not all! It’s most urgent that we discuss the situation and arrive at some decision, which—”

She listened blankly to the next stream of generalities, wondering about his motive. He was marking time, yet he wasn’t, not fully; she felt certain that he was holding her here for some specific purpose and, simultaneously, that he was holding her for the mere sake of her presence.

It was some new trait in him, which she had begun to notice ever since Cherryl’s death. He had come running to her, rushing, unannounced, into her apartment on the evening of the day when Cherryl’s body had been found and the story of her suicide had filled the newspapers, given by some social worker who had witnessed it; “an inexplicable suicide,” the newspapers had called it, unable to discover any motive. “It wasn’t my fault!” he had screamed to her, as if she were the only judge whom he had to placate. “I’m not to blame for it! I’m not to blame!” He had been shaking with terror—yet she had caught a few glances thrown shrewdly at her face, which had seemed, inconceivably, to convey a touch of triumph. “Get out of here, Jim,” was all she had said to him.

He had never spoken to her again about Cherryl, but he had started coming to her office more often than usual, he had stopped her in the halls for snatches of pointless discussions—and such moments had grown into a sum that gave her an incomprehensible sensation: as if, while clinging to her for support and protection against some nameless terror, his arms were sliding to embrace her and to plunge a knife into her back.

“I am eager to know your views,” he was saying insistently, as she looked away. “It is most urgent that we discuss the situation and... and you haven’t said anything.” She did not turn. “It’s not as if there were no money to be had out of the railroad business, but—”

She glanced at him sharply; his eyes scurried away.

“What I mean is, some constructive policy has to be devised,” he droned on hastily. “Something has to be done... by somebody. In times of emergency—”

She knew what thought he had scurried to avoid, what hint he had given her, yet did not want her to acknowledge or discuss. She knew that no train schedules could be maintained any longer, no promises kept, no contracts observed, that regular trains were cancelled at a moment’s notice and transformed into emergency specials sent by unexplained orders to unexpected destinations—and that the orders came from Cuffy Meigs, sole judge of emergencies and of the public welfare.

She knew that factories were closing, some with their machinery stilled for lack of supplies that had not been received, others with their warehouses full of goods that could not be delivered. She knew that the old industries—the giants who had built their power by a purposeful course projected over a span of time—were left to exist at the whim of the moment, a moment they could not foresee or control. She knew that the best among them, those of the longest range and most complex function, had long since gone—and those still struggling to produce, struggling savagely to preserve the code of an age when production had been possible, were now inserting into their contracts a line shameful to a descendant of Nat Taggart: “Transportation permitting.”

And yet there were men—and she knew it—who were able to obtain transportation whenever they wished, as by a mystic secret, as by the grace of some power which one was not to question or explain.

They were the men whose dealings with Cuffy Meigs were regarded by people as that unknowable of mystic creeds which smites the observer for the sin of looking, so people kept their eyes closed, dreading, not ignorance, but knowledge. She knew that deals were made whereby those men sold a commodity known as “transportation pull”—a term which all understood, but none would dare define. She knew that these were the men of the emergency specials, the men who could cancel her scheduled trains and send them to any random spot of the continent which they chose to strike with their voodoo stamp, the stamp superseding contract, property, justice, reason and lives, the stamp stating that “the public welfare” required the immediate salvation of that spot. These were the men who sent trains to the relief of the Smather Brothers and their grapefruit in Arizona—to the relief of a factory in Florida engaged in the production of pin-ball machines—to the relief of a horse farm in Kentucky—to the relief of Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel.

These were the men who made deals with desperate industrialists to provide transportation for the goods stalled in their warehouses—or, failing to obtain the percentage demanded, made deals to purchase the goods, when the factory closed, at the bankruptcy sale, at ten cents on the dollar, and to speed the goods away in freight cars suddenly available, away to markets where dealers of the same kind were ready for the kill. These were the men who hovered over factories, waiting for the last breath of a furnace, to pounce upon the equipment—and over desolate sidings, to pounce upon the freight cars of undelivered goods—these were a new biological species, the hit-and-run businessmen, who did not stay in any line of business longer than the span of one deal, who had no payrolls to meet, no overhead to carry, no real estate to own, no equipment to build, whose only asset and sole investment consisted of an item known as “friendship.” These were the men whom official speeches described as “the progressive businessmen of our dynamic age,” but whom people called “the pull peddlers”—the species included many breeds, those of “transportation pull,” and of “steel pull” and “oil pull” and “wage-raise pull” and “suspended sentence pull”—men who were dynamic, who kept darting all over the country while no one else could move, men who were active and mindless, active, not like animals, but like that which breeds, feeds and moves upon the stillness of a corpse.

She knew that there was money to be had out of the railroad business and she knew who was now obtaining it. Cuffy Meigs was selling trains as he was selling the last of the railroad’s supplies, whenever he could rig a setup which would not let it be discovered or proved—selling rail to roads in Guatemala or to trolley companies in Canada, selling wire to manufacturers of juke boxes, selling crossties for fuel in resort hotels.

Did it matter—she thought, looking at the map—which part of the corpse had been consumed by which type of maggot, by those who gorged themselves or by those who gave the food to other maggots? So long as living flesh was prey to be devoured, did it matter whose stomachs it had gone to fill? There was no way to tell which devastation had been accomplished by the humanitarians and which by undisguised gangsters. There was no way to tell which acts of plunder had been prompted by the charity-lust of the Lawsons and which by the gluttony of Cuffy Meigs—no way to tell which communities had been immolated to feed another community one week closer to starvation and which to provide yachts for the pull-peddlers. Did it matter? Both were alike in fact as they were alike in spirit, both were in need and need was regarded as sole title to property, both were acting in strictest accordance with the same code of morality. Both held the immolation of men as proper and both were achieving it. There wasn’t even any way to tell who were the cannibals and who the victims—the communities that accepted as their rightful due the confiscated clothing or fuel of a town to the east of them, found, next week, their granaries confiscated to feed a town to the west—men had achieved the ideal of the centuries, they were practicing it in unobstructed perfection, they were serving need as their highest ruler, need as first claim upon them, need as their standard of value, as the coin of their realm, as more sacred than right and life. Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is his brother’s keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured by his neighbor’s brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth.

“What complaint do they now have to make?” she heard Hugh Akston’s voice in her mind. “That the universe is irrational? Is it?”

She sat looking at the map, her glance dispassionately solemn, as if no emotion save respect were permissible when observing the awesome power of logic. She was seeing—in the chaos of a perishing continent—the precise, mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held.

They had not wanted to know that this was what they wanted, they had not wanted to see that they had the power to wish, but not the power to fake—and they had achieved their wish to the letter, to the last bloodstained comma of it.

What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of pity?—she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: “I don’t want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they’ll never miss it!”—then, later, had snapped: “The tycoons can stand being squeezed, they’ve amassed enough to last them for three generations”—then, later, had yelled: “Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?”—now were screaming: “Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?” What were they counting on?—she wondered.

“You must do something!” cried James Taggart.

She whirled to face him. “I?”

“It’s your job, it’s your province, it’s your duty!”

“What is?”

“To act. To do.”

“To do—what?”

“How should I know? It’s your special talent. You’re the doer.”

She glanced at him: the statement was so oddly perceptive and so incongruously irrelevant. She rose to her feet.

“Is this all, Jim?”

“No! No! I want a discussion!”

“Go ahead.”

“But you haven’t said anything!”

“You haven’t, either.”

“But... What I mean is, there are practical problems to solve, which... For instance, what was that matter of our last allocation of new rail vanishing from the storehouse in Pittsburgh?”

“Cuffy Meigs stole it and sold it.”

“Can you prove it?” he snapped defensively.

“Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?”

“Then don’t talk about it, don’t be theoretical, we’ve got to deal with facts! We’ve got to deal with facts as they are today... I mean, we’ve got to be realistic and devise some practical means to protect our supplies under existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which—”

She chuckled. There was the form of the formless, she thought, there was the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy Meigs without acknowledging Meigs’ existence, to fight it without admitting its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game.

“What do you find so damn funny?” he snapped angrily.

“You know it.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you! I don’t know what’s happened to you... in the last two months... ever since you came back... You’ve never been so uncooperative!”

“Why, Jim, I haven’t argued with you in the last two months.”

“That’s what I mean!” He caught himself hastily, but not fast enough to miss her smile. “I mean, I wanted to have a conference, I wanted to know your view of the situation—”

“You know it.”

“But you haven’t said a word!”

“I said everything I had to say, three years ago. I told you where your course would take you. It has.”

“Now there you go again! What’s the use of theorizing? We’re here, we’re not back three years ago. We’ve got to deal with the present, not the past. Maybe things would have been different, if we had followed your opinion, maybe, but the fact is that we didn’t—and we’ve got to deal with facts. We’ve got to take reality as it is now, today!”

“Well, take it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Take your reality. I’ll merely take your orders.”

“That’s unfair! I’m asking for your opinion—”

“You’re asking for reassurance, Jim. You’re not going to get it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not going to help you pretend—by arguing with you—that the reality you’re talking about is not what it is, that there’s still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn’t.”

“Well...” There was no explosion, no anger—only the feebly uncertain voice of a man on the verge of abdication. “Well... what would you want me to do?”

“Give up.” He looked at her blankly. “Give up—all of you, you and your Washington friends and your looting planners and the whole of your cannibal philosophy. Give up and get out of the way and let those of us who can, start from scratch out of the ruins.”

“No!” The explosion came, oddly, now; it was the scream of a man who would die rather than betray his idea, and it came from a man who had spent his life evading the existence of ideas, acting with the expediency of a criminal. She wondered whether she had ever understood the essence of criminals. She wondered about the nature of the loyalty to the idea of denying ideas.

“No!” he cried, his voice lower, hoarser and more normal, sinking from the tone of a zealot to the tone of an overbearing executive.

“That’s impossible! That’s out of the question!”

“Who said so?”

“Never mind! It’s so! Why do you always think of the impractical?

Why don’t you accept reality as it is and do something about it?

You’re the realist, you’re the doer, the mover, the producer, the Nat Taggart, you’re the person who’s able to achieve any goal she chooses!

You could save us now, you could find a way to make things work—if you wanted to!”

She burst out laughing.

There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat’s directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing—all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs made world as an objective, unchangeable reality—then to continue producing abundance in that world. There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their “instincts” as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable—the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmer’s omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: “Now grow a harvest and feed us!”

No—she thought, expecting Jim to ask it—it would be useless to try to explain what she was laughing at, he would not be able to understand it.

But he did not ask it. Instead, she saw him slumping and heard him say—terrifyingly, because his words were so irrelevant, if he did not understand, and so monstrous, if he did, “Dagny, I’m your brother...”

She drew herself up, her muscles growing rigid, as if she were about to face a killer’s gun.

“Dagny”—his voice was the soft, nasal, monotonous whine of a beggar—“I want to be president of a railroad. I want it. Why can’t I have my wish as you always have yours? Why shouldn’t I be given the fulfillment of my desires as you always fulfill any desire of your own? Why should you be happy while I suffer? Oh yes, the world is yours, you’re the one who has the brains to run it. Then why do you permit suffering in your world? You proclaim the pursuit of happiness, but you doom me to frustration. Don’t I have the right to demand any form of happiness I choose? Isn’t that a debt which you owe me? Am I not your brother?”

His glance was like a prowler’s flashlight searching her face for a shred of pity. It found nothing but a look of revulsion.

“It’s your sin if I suffer! It’s your moral failure! I’m your brother, therefore I’m your responsibility, but you’ve failed to supply my wants, therefore you’re guilty! All of mankind’s moral leaders have said so for centuries—who are you to say otherwise? You’re so proud of yourself, you think that you’re pure and good—but you can’t be good, so long as I’m wretched. My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure of your virtue. I want this kind of world, today’s world, it gives me my share of authority, it allows me to feel important—make it work for me!—do something!—how do I know what?—it’s your problem and your duty! You have the privilege of strength, but I—I have the right of weakness! That’s a moral absolute!

Don’t you know it? Don’t you? Don’t you?”

His glance was now like the hands of a man hanging over an abyss, groping frantically for the slightest fissure of doubt, but slipping on the clean, polished rock of her face.

“You bastard,” she said evenly, without emotion, since the words were not addressed to anything human.

It seemed to her that she saw him fall into the abyss—even though there was nothing to see in his face except the look of a con man whose trick has not worked.

There was no reason to feel more revulsion than usual, she thought; he had merely uttered the things which were preached, heard and accepted everywhere; but this creed was usually expounded in the third person, and Jim had had the open effrontery to expound it in the first.

She wondered whether people accepted the doctrine of sacrifice provided its recipients did not identify the nature of their own claims and actions.

She turned to leave.

“No! No! Wait!” he cried, leaping to his feet, with a glance at his wrist watch. “It’s time now! There’s a particular news broadcast that I want you to hear!”

She stopped, held by curiosity.

He pressed the switch of the radio, watching her face openly, intently, almost insolently. His eyes had a look of fear and of oddly lecherous anticipation.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the voice of the radio speaker leaped forth abruptly; it had a tone of panic. “News of a shocking development has just reached us from Santiago, Chile!”

She saw the jerk of Taggart’s head and a sudden anxiety in his bewildered frown, as if something about the words and voice were not what he had expected.

“A special session of the legislature of the People’s State of Chile had been called for ten o’clock this morning, to pass an act of utmost importance to the people of Chile, Argentina and other South American People’s States. In line with the enlightened policy of Senior Ramirez, the new Head of the Chilean State—who came to power on the moral slogan that man is his brother’s keeper—the legislature was to nationalize the Chilean properties of d’Anconia Copper, thus opening the way for the People’s State of Argentina to nationalize the rest of the d’Anconia properties the world over. This, however, was known only to a very few of the top-level leaders of both nations. The measure had been kept secret in order to avoid debate and reactionary opposition.

The seizure of the multi-billion dollar d’Anconia Copper was to come as a munificent surprise to the country.

“On the stroke of ten, in the exact moment when the chairman’s gavel struck the rostrum, opening the session—almost as if the gavel’s blow had set it off—the sound of a tremendous explosion rocked the hall, shattering the glass of its windows. It came from the harbor, a few streets away—and when the legislators rushed to the windows, they saw a long column of flame where once there had risen the familiar silhouettes of the ore docks of d’Anconia Copper. The ore docks had been blown to bits.

“The chairman averted panic and called the session to order. The act of nationalization was read to the assembly, to the sound of fire alarm sirens and distant cries. It was a gray morning, dark with rain clouds, the explosion had broken an electric transmitter—so that the assembly voted on the measure by the light of candles, while the red glow of the fire kept sweeping over the great vaulted ceiling above their heads.

“But more terrible a shock came later, when the legislators called a hasty recess to announce to the nation the good news that the people now owned d’Anconia Copper. While they were voting, word had come from the closest and farthest points of the globe that there was no d’Anconia Copper left on earth. Ladies and gentlemen, not anywhere.

In that same instant, on the stroke of ten, by an infernal marvel of synchronization, every property of d’Anconia Copper on the face of the globe, from Chile to Siam to Spain to Pottsville, Montana, had been blown up and swept away.

“The d’Anconia workers everywhere had been handed their last pay checks, in cash, at nine A.M., and by nine-thirty had been moved off the premises. The ore docks, the smelters, the laboratories, the office buildings were demolished. Nothing was left of the d’Anconia ore ships which had been in port—and only lifeboats carrying the crews were left of those ships which had been at sea. As to the d’Anconia mines, some were buried under tons of blasted rock, while others were found not to be worth the price of blasting. An astounding number of these mines, as reports pouring in seem to indicate, had continued to be run, even though exhausted years ago.

“Among the thousands of d’Anconia employees, the police have found no one with any knowledge of how this monstrous plot had been conceived, organized and carried out. But the cream of the d’Anconia staff are not here any longer. The most efficient of the executives, mineralogists, engineers, superintendents have vanished—all the men upon whom the People’s State had been counting to carry on the work and cushion the process of readjustment. The most able—correction: the most selfish—of the men are gone. Reports from the various banks indicate that there are no d’Anconia accounts left anywhere; the money has been spent down to the last penny.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the d’Anconia fortune—the greatest fortune on earth, the legendary fortune of the centuries—has ceased to exist. In place of the golden dawn of a new age, the People’s States of Chile and Argentina are left with a pile of rubble and hordes of unemployed on their hands.

“No clue has been found to the fate or the whereabouts of Senor Francisco d’Anconia. He has vanished, leaving nothing behind him, not even a message of farewell.”

Thank you, my darling—thank you in the name of the last of us, even if you will not hear it and will not care to hear... It was not a sentence, but the silent emotion of a prayer in her mind, addressed to the laughing face of a boy she had known at sixteen.

Then she noticed that she was clinging to the radio, as if the faint electric beat within it still held a tie to the only living force on earth, which it had transmitted for a few brief moments and which now filled the room where all else was dead.

As distant remnants of the explosion’s wreckage, she noticed a sound that came from Jim, part-moan, part-scream, part-growl—then the sight of Jim’s shoulders shaking over a telephone and his distorted voice screaming, “But, Rodrigo, you said it was safe! Rodrigo—oh God!—do you know how much I’d sunk into it?”—then the shriek of another phone on his desk, and his voice snarling into another receiver, his hand still clutching the first, “Shut your trap, Orren! What are you to do? What do I care, God damn you!”

There were people rushing into the office, the telephones were screaming and, alternating between pleas and curses, Jim kept yelling into one receiver, “Get me Santiago!... Get Washington to get me Santiago!”

Distantly, as on the margin of her mind, she could see what sort of game the men behind the shrieking phones had played and lost. They seemed far away, like tiny commas squirming on the white field under the lens of a microscope. She wondered how they could ever expect to be taken seriously when a Francisco d’Anconia was possible on earth.

She saw the glare of the explosion in every face she met through the rest of the day—and in every face she passed in the darkness of the streets, that evening. If Francisco had wanted a worthy funeral pyre for d’Anconia Copper, she thought, he had succeeded. There it was, in the streets of New York City, the only city on earth still able to understand it—in the faces of people, in their whispers, the whispers crackling tensely like small tongues of fire, the faces lighted by a look that was both solemn and frantic, the shadings of expressions appearing to sway and weave, as if cast by a distant flame, some frightened, some angry, most of them uneasy, uncertain, expectant, but all of them acknowledging a fact much beyond an industrial catastrophe, all of them knowing what it meant, though none would name its meaning, all of them carrying a touch of laughter, a laughter of amusement and defiance, the bitter laughter of perishing victims who feel that they are avenged.

She saw it in the face of Hank Rearden, when she met him for dinner that evening. As his tall, confident figure walked toward her—the only figure that seemed at home in the costly setting of a distinguished restaurant—she saw the look of eagerness fighting the sternness of his features, the look of a young boy still open to the enchantment of the unexpected. He did not speak of this day’s event, but she knew that it was the only image in his mind.

They had been meeting whenever he came to the city, spending a brief, rare evening together—with their past still alive in their silent acknowledgment—with no future in their work and in their common struggle, but with the knowledge that they were allies gaining support from the fact of each other’s existence.

He did not want to mention today’s event, he did not want to speak of Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, “He did keep his oath, didn’t he?”

“His oath?” she asked, startled, thinking of the inscription on the temple of Atlantis.

“He said to me, ‘I swear—by the woman I love—that I am your friend,’ He was.”

“He is.”

He shook his head. “I have no right to think of him. I have no right to accept what he’s done as an act in my defense. And yet...”

He stopped.

“But it was, Hank. In defense of all of us—and of you, most of all.”

He looked away, out at the city. They sat at the side of the room, with a sheet of glass as an invisible protection against the sweep of space and streets sixty floors below. The city seemed abnormally distant: it lay flattened down to the pool of its lowest stories. A few blocks away, its tower merging into darkness, the calendar hung at the level of their faces, not as a small, disturbing rectangle, but as an enormous screen, eerily close and large, flooded by the dead, white glow of light projected through an empty film, empty but for the letters: September 2.

“Rearden Steel is now working at capacity,” he was saying indifferently. “They’ve lifted the production quotas off my mills—for the next five minutes, I guess. I don’t know how many of their own regulations they’ve suspended, I don’t think they know it, either, they don’t bother keeping track of legality any longer, I’m sure I’m a law-breaker on five or six counts, which nobody could prove or disprove—all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me to go full steam ahead.” He shrugged. “When another gangster kicks him out tomorrow, I’ll probably be shut down, as penalty for illegal operation. But according to the plan of the present split-second, they’ve begged me to keep pouring my Metal, in any amount and by any means I choose.”

She noticed the occasional, surreptitious glances that people were throwing in their direction. She had noticed it before, ever since her broadcast, ever since the two of them had begun to appear in public together. Instead of the disgrace he had dreaded, there was an air of awed uncertainty in people’s manner—uncertainty of their own moral precepts, awe in the presence of two persons who dared to be certain of being right. People were looking at them with anxious curiosity, with envy, with respect, with the fear of offending an unknown, proudly rigorous standard, some almost with an air of apology that seemed to say: “Please forgive us for being married.” There were some who had a look of angry malice, and a few who had a look of admiration.

“Dagny,” he asked suddenly, “do you suppose he’s in New York?”

“No. I’ve called the Wayne-Falkland. They told me that the lease on his suite had expired a month ago and he did not renew it.”

“They’re looking for him all over the world,” he said, smiling.

“They’ll never find him.” The smile vanished. “Neither will I.” His voice slipped back to the flat, gray tone of duty: “Well, the mills are working, but I’m not. I’m doing nothing but running around the country like a scavenger, searching for illegal ways to purchase raw materials.

Hiding, sneaking, lying—just to get a few tons of ore or coal or copper.

They haven’t lifted their regulations off my raw materials. They know that I’m pouring more Metal than the quotas they give me could produce. They don’t care.” He added, “They think I do.”

“Tired, Hank?”

“Bored to death.”

There was a time, she thought, when his mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind.

“It’s becoming almost impossible to get iron ore,” he said indifferently, then added, his voice suddenly alive, “Now it’s going to be completely impossible to get copper.” He was grinning.

She wondered how long a man could continue to work against himself, to work when his deepest desire was not to succeed, but to fail.

She understood the connection of his thoughts when he said, “I’ve never told you, but I’ve met Ragnar Danneskjold.”

“He told me.”

“What? Where did you ever—” He stopped. “Of course,” he said, his voice tense and low. “He would be one of them. You would have met him. Dagny, what are they like, those men who... No. Don’t answer me.” In a moment he added, “So I’ve met one of their agents.”

“You’ve met two of them.”

His response was a span of total stillness. “Of course,” he said dully.

“I knew it... I just wouldn’t admit to myself that I knew... He was their recruiting agent, wasn’t he?”

“One of their earliest and best.”

He chuckled; it was a sound of bitterness and longing. “That night... when they got Ken Danagger... I thought that they had not sent anyone after me...”

The effort by which he made his face grow rigid, was almost like the slow, resisted turn of a key locking a sunlit room he could not permit himself to examine. After a while, he said impassively, “Dagny, that new rail we discussed last month—I don’t think I’ll be able to deliver it. They haven’t lifted their regulations off my output, they’re still controlling my sales and disposing of my Metal as they please. But the bookkeeping is in such a snarl that I’m smuggling a few thousand tons into the black market every week. I think they know it. They’re pretending not to. They don’t want to antagonize me, right now. But, you see, I’ve been shipping every ton I could snatch, to some emergency customers of mine. Dagny, I was in Minnesota last month. I’ve seen what’s going on there. The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn’t going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city.

Minnesota is our last granary. They’ve had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They’re not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven’t been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to.

And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They’ve been spending more time fixing old tractors that can’t be fixed than plowing their fields.

I don’t know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don’t know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.” There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out.

Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching consumers. We’re giving loans, not alms. We’re supporting ability, not need. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull peddlers grow rich!”

He was looking at the image of a sight he had seen in Minnesota: the silhouette of an abandoned factory, with the light of the sunset streaming, unopposed, through the holes of its windows and the cracks of its roof, with the remnant of a sign: Ward Harvester Company.

“Oh, I know,” he said. “We’ll save them this winter, but the looters will devour them next year. Still, we’ll save them this winter...

Well, that’s why I won’t be able to smuggle any rail for you. Not in the immediate future—and there’s nothing left to us but the immediate future. I don’t know what is the use of feeding a country, if it loses its railroads—but what is the use of railroads where there is no food?

What is the use, anyway?”

“It’s all right, Hank, We’ll last with such rail as we have, for—”

She stopped.

“For a month?”

“For the winter—I hope.”

Cutting across their silence, a shrill voice reached them from another table, and they turned to look at a man who had the jittery manner of a cornered gangster about to reach for his gun. “An act of anti-social destruction,” he was snarling to a sullen companion, “at a time when there’s such a desperate shortage of copper!... We can’t permit it!

We can’t permit it to be true!”

Rearden turned abruptly to look off, at the city. “I’d give anything to know where he is,” he said, his voice low. “Just to know where he is, right now, at this moment.”

“What would you do, if you knew it?”

He dropped his hand in a gesture of futility. “I wouldn’t approach him. The only homage I can still pay him is not to cry for forgiveness where no forgiveness is possible.”

They remained silent. They listened to the voices around them, to the splinters of panic trickling through the luxurious room.

She had not been aware that the same presence seemed to be an invisible guest at every table, that the same subject kept breaking through the attempts at any other conversation. People sat in a manner, not quite of cringing, but as if they found the room too large and too exposed—a room of glass, blue velvet, aluminum and gentle lighting. They looked as if they had come to this room at the price of countless evasions, to let it help them pretend that theirs was still a civilized existence—but an act oЈ primeval violence had blasted the nature of their world into the open and they were no longer able not to see.

“How could he? How could he?” a woman was demanding with petulant terror. “He had no right to do it!”

“It was an accident,” said a young man with a staccato voice and an odor of public payroll. “It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people’s enemies.”

“Right and wrong is all very well for academic conversations,” said a woman with a schoolroom voice and a barroom mouth, “but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?”

“I don’t understand it,” an old man was saying with quavering bitterness. “After centuries of efforts to curb man’s innate brutality, after centuries of teaching, training and indoctrination with the gentle and the humane!”

A woman’s bewildered voice rose uncertainly and trailed off: “I thought we were living in an age of brotherhood...”

“I’m scared,” a young girl was repeating, “I’m scared... oh, I don’t know!... I’m just scared...”

“He couldn’t have done it!”... “He did!”... “But why?”...

“I refuse to believe it!”... “It’s not human!”... “But why?”...

“Just a worthless playboy!”... “But why?”

The muffled scream of a woman across the room and some half grasped signal on the edge of Dagny’s vision, came simultaneously and made her whirl to look at the city.

The calendar was run by a mechanism locked in a room behind the screen, unrolling the same film year after year, projecting the dates in steady rotation, in changeless rhythm, never moving but on the stroke of midnight. The speed of Dagny’s turn gave her time to see a phenomenon as unexpected as if a planet had reversed its orbit in the sky: she saw the words “September 2” moving upward and vanishing past the edge of the screen.

Then, written across the enormous page, stopping time, as a last message to the world and to the world’s motor which was New York, she saw the lines of a sharp, intransigent handwriting:

Brother, you asked for it!

Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia

She did not know which shock was greater: the sight of the message or the sound of Rearden’s laughter—Rearden, standing on his feet, in full sight and hearing of the room behind him, laughing above their moans of panic, laughing in greeting, in salute, in acceptance of the gift he had tried to reject, in release, in triumph, in surrender.

On the evening of September 7, a copper wire broke in Montana, stopping the motor of a loading crane on a spur track of Taggart Transcontinental, at the rim of the Stanford Copper Mine.

The mine had been working on three shifts, its days and nights blending into a single stretch of struggle to lose no minute, no drop of copper it could squeeze from the shelves of a mountain into the nation’s industrial desert. The crane broke down at the task of loading a train; it stopped abruptly and hung still against the evening sky, between a string of empty cars and piles of suddenly immovable ore.

The men of the railroad and of the mine stopped in dazed bewilderment: they found that in all the complexity of their equipment, among the drills, the motors, the derricks, the delicate gauges, the ponderous floodlights beating down into the pits and ridges of a mountain—there was no wire to mend the crane. They stopped, like men on an ocean liner propelled by ten-thousand-horsepower generators, but perishing for lack of a safety pin.

The station agent, a young man with a swift body and a brusque voice, stripped the wiring from the station building and set the crane in motion again—and while the ore went clattering to fill the cars, the light of candles came trembling through the dusk from the windows of the station.

“Minnesota, Eddie,” said Dagny grimly, closing the drawer of her special file. “Tell the Minnesota Division to ship half their stock of wire to Montana.” “But good God, Dagny!—with the peak of the harvest rush approaching—” “They’ll hold through it—I think. We don’t dare lose a single supplier of copper.”

“But I have!” screamed James Taggart, when she reminded him once more. “I have obtained for you the top priority on copper wire, the first claim, the uppermost ration level, I’ve given you all the cards, certificates, documents and requisitions—what else do you want?” “The copper wire.” “I’ve done all I could! Nobody can blame me!”

She did not argue. The afternoon newspaper was lying on his desk—and she was staring at an item on the back page: An Emergency State Tax had been passed in California for the relief of the state’s unemployed, in the amount of fifty per cent of any local corporation’s gross income ahead of other taxes; the California oil companies had gone out of business.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Rearden,” said an unctuous voice over a long distance telephone line from Washington, “I just wanted to assure you that you will not have to worry.” “About what?” asked Rearden, baffled. “About that temporary bit of confusion in California. We’ll straighten it out in no time, it was an act of illegal insurrection, their state government had no right to impose local taxes detrimental to national taxes, we’ll negotiate an equitable arrangement immediately—but in the meantime, if you have been disturbed by any unpatriotic rumors about the California oil companies, I just wanted to tell you that Rearden Steel has been placed in the top category of essential need, with first claim upon any oil available anywhere in the nation, very top category, Mr. Rearden—so I just wanted you to know that you won’t have to worry about the problem of fuel this winter!”

Rearden hung up the telephone receiver, with a frown of worry, not about the problem of fuel and the end of the California oil fields—disasters of this kind had become habitual—but about the fact that the Washington planners found it necessary to placate him. This was new; he wondered what it meant. Through the years of his struggle, he had learned that an apparently causeless antagonism was not hard to deal with, but an apparently causeless solicitude was an ugly danger. The same wonder struck him again, when, walking down an alley between the mill structures, he caught sight of a slouching figure whose posture combined an air of insolence with an air of expecting to be swatted: it was his brother Philip.

Ever since he had moved to Philadelphia, Rearden had not visited his former home and had not heard a word from his family, whose bills he went on paying. Then, inexplicably, twice in the last few weeks, he had caught Philip wandering through the mills for no apparent reason.

He had been unable to tell whether Philip was sneaking to avoid him or waiting to catch his attention; it had looked like both. He had been unable to discover any clue to Philip’s purpose, only some incomprehensible solicitude, of a kind Philip had never displayed before.

The first time, in answer to his startled “What are you doing here?”—Philip had said vaguely, “Well, I know that you don’t like me to come to your office.” “What do you want?” “Oh, nothing... but... well, Mother is worried about you.” “Mother can call me any time she wishes.” Philip had not answered, but had proceeded to question him, in an unconvincingly casual manner, about his work, his health, his business; the questions had kept hitting oddly beside the point, not questions about business, but more about his, Rearden’s, feelings toward business. Rearden had cut him short and waved him away, but had been left with the small, nagging sense of an incident that remained inexplicable.

The second time, Philip had said, as sole explanation, “We just want to know how you feel.” “Who’s we?” “Why... Mother and I. These are difficult times and... well, Mother wants to know how you feel about it all.” “Tell her that I don’t.” The words had seemed to hit Philip in some peculiar manner, almost as if this were the one answer he dreaded. “Get out of here,” Rearden had ordered wearily, “and the next time you want to see me, make an appointment and come to my office. But don’t come unless you have something to say. This is not a place where one discusses feelings, mine or anybody else’s.”

Philip had not called for an appointment—but now there he was again, slouching among the giant shapes of the furnaces, with an air of guilt and snobbishness together, as if he were both snooping and slumming.

“But I do have something to say! I do!” he cried hastily, in answer to the angry frown on Rearden’s face.

“Why didn’t you come to my office?”

“You don’t want me in your office.”

“I don’t want you here, either.”

“But I’m only... I’m only trying to be considerate and not to take your time when you’re so busy and... you are very busy, aren’t you?”

“And?”

“And... well, I just wanted to catch you in a spare moment... to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“I... Well, I need a job.”

He said it belligerently and drew back a little. Rearden stood looking at him blankly.

“Henry, I want a job. I mean, here, at the mills. I want you to give me something to do. I need a job, I need to earn my living.

I’m tired of alms.” He was groping for something to say, his voice both offended and pleading, as if the necessity to justify the plea were an unfair imposition upon him. “I want a livelihood of my own, I’m not asking you for charity, I’m asking you to give me a chance!”

“This is a factory, Philip, not a gambling joint.”

“Uh?”

“We don’t take chances or give them.”

“I’m asking you to give me a job!”

“Why should I?”

“Because I need it!”

Rearden pointed to the red spurts of flame shooting from the black shape of a furnace, shooting safely into space four hundred feet of steel-clay-and-steam-embodied thought above them. “I needed that furnace, Philip. “It wasn’t my need that gave it to me.”

Philip’s face assumed a look of not having heard. “You’re not officially supposed to hire anybody, but that’s just a technicality, if you’ll put me on, my friends will okay it without any trouble and—” Something about Rearden’s eyes made him stop abruptly, then ask in an angrily impatient voice, “Well, what’s the matter? What have I said that’s wrong?”

“What you haven’t said.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What you’re squirming to leave unmentioned.”

“What?”

“That you’d be of no use to me whatever.”

“Is that what you—” Philip started with automatic righteousness, but stopped and did not finish.

“Yes,” said Rearden, smiling, “that’s what I think of first.”

Philip’s eyes oozed away; when he spoke, his voice sounded as if it were darting about at random, picking stray sentences: “Everybody is entitled to a livelihood... How am I going to get it, if nobody gives me my chance?”

“How did I get mine?”

“I wasn’t born owning a steel plant.”

“Was I?”

“I can do anything you can—if you’ll teach me.”

“Who taught me?”

“Why do you keep saying that? I’m not talking about you!”

“I am.”

In a moment, Philip muttered, “What do you have to worry about?

It’s not your livelihood that’s in question!”

Rearden pointed to the figures of men in the steaming rays of the furnace. “Can you do what they’re doing?”

“I don’t see what you’re—”

“What will happen if I put you there and you ruin a heat of steel for me?”

“What’s more important, that your damn steel gets poured or that I eat?”

“How do you propose to eat if the steel doesn’t get poured?”

Philip’s face assumed a look of reproach. “I’m not in a position to argue with you right now, since you hold the upper hand.”

“Then don’t argue.”

“Uh?”

“Keep your mouth shut and get out of here.”

“But I meant—” He stopped.

Rearden chuckled. “You meant that it’s I who should keep my mouth shut, because I hold the upper hand, and should give in to you, because you hold no hand at all?”

“That’s a peculiarly crude way of stating a moral principle.”

“But that’s what your moral principle amounts to, doesn’t it?”

“You can’t discuss morality in materialistic terms.”

“We’re discussing a job in a steel plant—and, boy! is that a materialistic place!”

Philip’s body drew a shade tighter together and his eyes became a shade more glazed, as if in fear of the place around him, in resentment of its sight, in an effort not to concede its reality. He said, in the soft, stubborn whine of a voodoo incantation, “It’s a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job.” His voice rose: “I’m entitled to it!”

“You are? Go on, then, collect your claim.”

“Uh?”

“Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows.”

“I mean—”

“You mean that it doesn’t? You mean that you need it, but can’t create it? You mean that you’re entitled to a job which I must create for you?”

“Yes!”

“And if I don’t?”

The silence went stretching through second after second. “I don’t understand you,” said Philip; his voice had the angry bewilderment of a man who recites the formulas of a well-tested role, but keeps getting the wrong cues in answer. “I don’t understand why one can’t talk to you any more. I don’t understand what sort of theory you’re propounding and—”

“Oh yes, you do.”

As if refusing to believe that the formulas could fail, Philip burst out with: “Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You’re only a businessman, you’re not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts who have conceded for centuries—”

“Cut it, Philip. What’s the gimmick?”

“Gimmick?”

“Why the sudden ambition?”

“Well, at a time like this...”

“Like what?”

“Well, every man has the right to have some means of support and... and not be left to be tossed aside... When things are so uncertain, a man’s got to have some security... some foothold... I mean, at a time like this, if anything happened to you, I’d have no—”

“What do you expect to happen to me?”

“Oh, I don’t! I don’t!” The cry was oddly, incomprehensibly genuine.

“I don’t expect anything to happen... Do you?”

“Such as what?”

“How do I know?... But I’ve got nothing except the pittance you give me and... and you might change your mind any time.”

“I might.”

“And I haven’t any hold on you at all.”

“Why did it take you that many years to realize it and start worrying?

Why now?”

“Because... because you’ve changed. You... you used to have a sense of duty and moral responsibility, but... you’re losing it.

You’re losing it, aren’t you?”

Rearden stood studying him silently; there was something peculiar in Philip’s manner of sliding toward questions, as if his words were accidental, but the too casual, the faintly insistent questions were the key to his purpose.

“Well, I’ll be glad to take the burden off your shoulders, if I’m a burden to you!” Philip snapped suddenly. “Just give me a job, and your conscience won’t have to bother you about me any longer!”

“It doesn’t.”

“That’s what I mean! You don’t care. You don’t care what becomes of any of us, do you?”

“Of whom?”

“Why... Mother and me and... and mankind in general. But I’m not going to appeal to your better self. I know that you’re ready to ditch me at a moment’s notice, so—”

“You’re lying, Philip. That’s not what you’re worried about. If it were, you’d be angling for a chunk of cash, not for a job, not—”

“No! I want a job!” The cry was immediate and almost frantic. “Don’t try to buy me off with cash! I want a job!”

“Pull yourself together, you poor louse. Do you hear what you’re saying?”

Philip spit out his answer with impotent hatred: “You can’t talk to me that way!”

“Can you?”

“I only—”

“To buy you off? Why should I try to buy you off—instead of kicking you out, as I should have, years ago?”

“Well, after all, I’m your brother!”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“One’s supposed to have some sort of feeling for one’s brother.”

“Do you?”

Philip’s mouth swelled petulantly; he did not answer; he waited; Rearden let him wait. Philip muttered, “You’re supposed... at least... to have some consideration for my feelings... but you haven’t.”

“Have you for mine?”

“Yours? Your feelings?” It was not malice in Philip’s voice, but worse: it was a genuine, indignant astonishment. “You haven’t any feelings. You’ve never felt anything at all. You’ve never suffered!”

It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a sensation and a sight: the exact sensation of what he had felt in the cab of the first train’s engine on the John Galt Line—and the sight of Philip’s eyes, the pale, half-liquid eyes presenting the uttermost of human degradation: an uncontested pain, and, with the obscene insolence of a skeleton toward a living being, demanding that this pain be held as the highest of values. You’ve never suffered, the eyes were saying to him accusingly—while he was seeing the night in his office when his ore mines were taken away from him—the moment when he had signed the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal—the month of days inside a plane that searched for the remains of Dagny’s body. You’ve never suffered, the eyes were saying with self-righteous scorn—while he remembered the sensation of proud chastity with which he had fought through those moments, refusing to surrender to pain, a sensation made of his love, of his loyalty, of his knowledge that joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture. You’ve never suffered, the dead stare of the eyes was saying, you’ve never felt anything, because only to suffer is to feel—there’s no such thing as joy, there’s only pain and the absence of pain, only pain and the zero, when one feels nothing—I suffer, I’m twisted by suffering, I’m made of undiluted suffering, that’s my purity, that’s my virtue—and yours, you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, yours is to relieve me of my pain—cut your unsuffering body to patch up mine, cut your unfeeling soul to stop mine from feeling—and we’ll achieve the ultimate ideal, the triumph over life, the zero! He was seeing the nature of those who, for centuries, had not recoiled from the preachers of annihilation—he was seeing the nature of the enemies he had been fighting all his life.

“Philip,” he said, “get out of here.” His voice was like a ray of sunlight in a morgue, it was the plain, dry, daily voice of a businessman, the sound of health, addressed to an enemy one could not honor by anger, nor even by horror. “And don’t ever try to enter these mills again, because there will be orders at every gate to throw you out, if you try it.”

“Well, after all,” said Philip, in the angry and cautious tone of a tentative threat, “I could have my friends assign me to a job here and compel you to accept it!”

Rearden had started to go, but he stopped and turned to look at his brother.

Philip’s moment of grasping a sudden revelation was not accomplished by means of thought, but by means of that dark sensation which was his only mode of consciousness: he felt a sensation of terror, squeezing his throat, shivering down into his stomach—he was seeing the spread of the mills, with the roving streamers of flame, with the ladles of molten metal sailing through space on delicate cables, with open pits the color of glowing coal, with cranes coming at his head, pounding past, holding tons of steel by the invisible power of magnets—and he knew that he was afraid of this place, afraid to the death, that he dared not move without the protection and guidance of the man before him—then he looked at the tall, straight figure standing casually still, the figure with the unflinching eyes whose sight had cut through rock and flame to build this place—and then he knew how easily the man he was proposing to compel could let a single bucket of metal tilt over a second ahead of its time or let a single crane drop its load a foot short of its goal, and there would be nothing left of him, of Philip the claimant—and his only protection lay in the fact that his mind would think of such actions, but the mind of Hank Rearden would not.

“But we’d better keep it on a friendly basis,” said Philip.

“You’d better,” said Rearden and walked away.

Men who worship pain—thought Rearden, staring at the image of the enemies he had never been able to understand—they’re men who worship pain. It seemed monstrous, yet peculiarly devoid of importance.

He felt nothing. It was like trying to summon emotion toward inanimate objects, toward refuse sliding down a mountainside to crush him. One could flee from the slide or build retaining walls against it or be crushed—but one could not grant any anger, indignation or moral concern to the senseless motions of the un-living; no, worse, he thought—the antiliving.

The same sense of detached unconcern remained with him while he sat in a Philadelphia courtroom and watched men perform the motions which were to grant him his divorce. He watched them utter mechanical generalities, recite vague phrases of fraudulent evidence, play an intricate game of stretching words to convey no facts and no meaning. He had paid them to do it—he whom the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the facts and plead the truth—the law which delivered his fate, not to objective rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a wizened face and a look of empty cunning.

Lillian was not present in the courtroom; her attorney made gestures once in a while, with the energy of letting water run through his fingers. They all knew the verdict in advance and they knew its reason; no other reason had existed for years, where no standards, save whim, had existed. They seemed to regard it as their rightful prerogative; they acted as if the purpose of the procedure were not to try a case, but to give them jobs, as if their jobs were to recite the appropriate formulas with no responsibility to know what the formulas accomplished, as if a courtroom were the one place where questions of right and wrong were irrelevant and they, the men in charge of dispensing justice, were safely wise enough to know that no justice existed. They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of objective reality.

But the ten years of his marriage had been real, he thought—and these were the men who assumed the power to dispose of it, to decide whether he would have a chance of contentment on earth or be condemned to torture for the rest of his lifetime. He remembered the austerely pitiless respect he had felt for his contract of marriage, for all his contracts and all his legal obligations—and he saw what sort of legality his scrupulous observance was expected to serve.

He noticed that the puppets of the courtroom had started by glancing at him in the sly, wise manner of fellow conspirators sharing a common guilt, mutually safe from moral condemnation. Then, when they observed that he was the only man in the room who looked steadily straight at anyone’s face, he saw resentment growing in their eyes. Incredulously, he realized what it was that had been expected of him: he, the victim, chained, bound, gagged and left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that the farce he had purchased was a process of law, that the edicts enslaving him had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the guardians of justice, and that the blame was his, not theirs. It was like blaming the victim of a holdup for corrupting the integrity of the thug. And yet—he thought—through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists. The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.

When he walked out of the courtroom into the chilly drizzle of a gray afternoon, he felt as if he had been divorced, not only from Lillian, but from the whole of the human society that supported the procedure he had witnessed.

The face of his attorney, an elderly man of the old-fashioned school, wore an expression that made it look as if he longed to take a bath.

“Say, Hank,” he asked as sole comment, “is there something the looters are anxious to get from you right now?” “Not that I know of. Why?”

“The thing went too smoothly. There were a few points at which I expected pressure and hints for some extras, but the boys sailed past and took no advantage of it. Looks to me as if orders had come from on high to treat you gently and let you have your way. Are they planning something new against your mills?” “Not that I know of,” said Rearden—and was astonished to hear in his mind: Not that I care.

It was on the same afternoon, at the mills, that he saw the Wet Nurse hurrying toward him—a gangling, coltish figure with a peculiar mixture of brusqueness, awkwardness and decisiveness.

“Mr. Rearden, I would like to speak to you.” His voice was diffident, yet oddly firm.

“Go ahead.”

“There’s something I want to ask you.” The boy’s face was solemn and taut. “I want you to know that I know you should refuse me, but I want to ask it just the same... and... and if it’s presumptuous, then just tell me to go to hell.”

“Okay. Try it.”

“Mr. Rearden, would you give me a job?” It was the effort to sound normal that betrayed the days of struggle behind the question. “I want to quit what I’m doing and go to work. I mean, real work—in steel making, like I thought I’d started to, once. I want to earn my keep. I’m tired of being a bedbug.”

Rearden could not resist smiling and reminding him, in the tone of a quotation, “Now why use such words, Non-Absolute? If we don’t use ugly words, we won’t have any ugliness and—” But he saw the desperate earnestness of the boy’s face and stopped, his smile vanishing.

“I mean it, Mr. Rearden. And I know what the word means and it’s the right word. I’m tired of being paid, with your money, to do nothing except make it impossible for you to make any money at all. I know that anyone who works today is only a sucker for bastards like me, but... well, God damn it, I’d rather be a sucker, if that’s all there’s left to be!”

His voice had risen to a cry. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Rearden,” he said stiffly, looking away. In a moment, he went on in his woodenly unemotional tone. “I want to get out of the Deputy-Director-of-Distribution racket. I don’t know that I’d be of much use to you, I’ve got a college diploma in metallurgy, but that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. But I think I’ve learned a little about the work in the two years I’ve been here—and if you could use me at all, as sweeper or scrap man or whatever you’d trust me with, I’d tell them where to put the deputy directorship and I’d go to work for you tomorrow, next week, this minute or whenever you say.” He avoided looking at Rearden, not in a manner of evasion, but as if he had no right to do it.

“Why were you afraid to ask me?” said Rearden gently.

The boy glanced at him with indignant astonishment, as if the answer were self-evident. “Because after the way I started here and the way I acted and what I’m deputy of, if I come asking you for favors, you ought to kick me in the teeth!”

“You have learned a great deal in the two years you’ve been here.”

“No, I—” He glanced at Rearden, understood, looked away and said woodenly, “Yeah... if that’s what you mean.”

“Listen, kid, I’d give you a job this minute and I’d trust you with more than a sweeper’s job, if it were up to me. But have you forgotten the Unification Board? I’m not allowed to hire you and you’re not allowed to quit. Sure, men are quitting all the time, and we’re hiring others under phony names and fancy papers proving that they’ve worked here for years. You know it, and thanks for keeping your mouth shut. But do you think that if I hired you that way, your friends in Washington would miss it?”

The boy shook his head slowly.

“Do you think that if you quit their service to become a sweeper, they wouldn’t understand your reason?”

The boy nodded.

“Would they let you go?”

The boy shook his head. After a moment, he said in a tone of forlorn astonishment, “I hadn’t thought of that at all, Mr. Rearden. I forgot them. I kept thinking of whether you’d want me or not and that the only thing that counted was your decision.”

“I know.”

“And... it is the only thing that counts, in fact.”

“Yes, Non-Absolute, in fact.”

The boy’s mouth jerked suddenly into the brief, mirthless twist of a smile. “I guess I’m tied worse than any sucker...”

“Yes. There’s nothing you can do now, except apply to the Unification Board for permission to change your job. I’ll support your application, if you want to try—only I don’t think they’ll grant it. I don’t think they’ll let you work for me.”

“No. They won’t.”

“If you maneuver enough and lie enough, they might permit you to transfer to a private job—with some other steel company.”

“No! I don’t want to go anywhere else! I don’t want to leave this place!” He stood looking off at the invisible vapor of rain over the flame of the furnaces. After a while, he said quietly, “I’d better stay put, I guess. I’d better go on being a deputy looter. Besides, if I left, God only knows what sort of bastard they’d saddle you with in my place!”

He turned. “They’re up to something, Mr. Rearden. I don’t know what it is, but they’re getting ready to spring something on you.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But they’ve been watching every opening here, in the last few weeks, every desertion, and slipping their own gang in. A queer sort of gang, too—real goons, some of them, that I’d swear never stepped inside a steel plant before. I’ve had orders to get as many of ‘our boys’ in as possible. They wouldn’t tell me why. I don’t know what it is they’re planning. I’ve tried to pump them, but they’re acting pretty cagey about it. I don’t think they trust me any more. I’m losing the right touch, I guess. All I know is they’re getting set to pull something here.”

“Thanks for warning me.”

“I’ll try to get the dope on it. I’ll try my damndest to get it in time.” He turned brusquely and started off, but stopped. “Mr. Rearden, if it were up to you, you would have hired me?”

“I would have, gladly and at once.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rearden,” he said, his voice solemn and low, then walked away.

Rearden stood looking after him, seeing, with a tearing smile of pity, what it was that the ex-relativist, the ex-pragmatist, the ex-amoralist was carrying away with him for consolation.

On the afternoon of September 11, a copper wire broke in Minnesota, stopping the belts of a grain elevator at a small country station of Taggart Transcontinental.

A flood of wheat was moving down the highways, the roads, the abandoned trails of the countryside, emptying thousands of acres of farmland upon the fragile dams of the railroad’s stations. It was moving day and night, the first trickles growing into streams, then rivers, then torrents—moving on palsied trucks with coughing, tubercular motors—on wagons pulled by the rusty skeletons of starving horses—on carts pulled by oxen—on the nerves and last energy of men who had lived through two years of disaster for the triumphant reward of this autumn’s giant harvest, men who had patched their trucks and carts with wire, blankets, ropes and sleepless nights, to make them hold together for this one more journey, to carry the grain and collapse at destination, but to give their owners a chance at survival.

Every year, at this season, another movement had gone clicking across the country, drawing freight cars from all corners of the continent to the Minnesota Division of Taggart Transcontinental, the beat of train wheels preceding the creak of the wagons, like an advance echo rigorously planned, ordered and timed to meet the flood. The Minnesota Division drowsed through the year, to come to violent life for the weeks of the harvest; fourteen thousand freight cars had jammed its yards each year; fifteen thousand were expected this time. The first of the wheat trains had started to channel the flood into the hungry flour mills, then bakeries, then stomachs of the nation—but every train, car and storage elevator counted, and there was no minute or inch of space to spare.

Eddie Willers watched Dagny’s face as she went through the cards of her emergency file; he could tell the content of the cards by her expression. “The Terminal,” she said quietly, closing the file. “Phone the Terminal downstairs and have them ship half their stock of wire to Minnesota.” Eddie said nothing and obeyed.

He said nothing, the morning when he put on her desk a telegram from the Taggart office in Washington, informing them of the directive which, due to the critical shortage of copper, ordered government agents to seize all copper mines and operate them as a public utility.

“Well,” she said, dropping the telegram into the wastebasket, “that’s the end of Montana.”

She said nothing when James Taggart announced to her that he was issuing an order to discontinue all dining cars on Taggart trains. “We can’t afford it any longer,” he explained, “we’ve always lost money on those goddamn diners, and when there’s no food to get, when restaurants are closing because they can’t grab hold of a pound of horse meat anywhere, how can railroads be expected to do it? Why in hell should we have to feed the passengers, anyway? They’re lucky if we give them transportation, they’d travel in cattle cars if necessary, let ’em pack their own box lunches, what do we care?—they’ve got no other trains to take!”

The telephone on her desk had become, not a voice of business, but an alarm siren for the desperate appeals of disaster. “Miss Taggart, we have no copper wire!” “Nails, Miss Taggart, plain nails, could you tell somebody to send us a keg of nails?” “Can you find any paint, Miss Taggart, any sort of waterproof paint anywhere?”

But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean—an enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation. Emma Chalmers, better known as Kip’s Ma, was an old sociologist who had hung about Washington for years, as other women of her age and type hang about barrooms. For some reason which nobody could define, the death of her son in the tunnel catastrophe had given her in Washington an aura of martyrdom, heightened by her recent conversion to Buddhism. “The soybean is a much more sturdy, nutritious and economical plant than all the extravagant foods which our wasteful, self-indulgent diet has conditioned us to expect,” Kip’s Ma had said over the radio; her voice always sounded as if it were falling in drops, not of water, but of mayonnaise.

“Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee—and if all of us were compelled to adopt soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number—that’s my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it’s our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There’s a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient.”

“Copper tubing, Miss Taggart, could you get some copper tubing for us somewhere?” the voices were pleading over her telephone. “Rail spikes, Miss Taggart!” “Screwdrivers, Miss Taggart!” “Light bulbs, Miss Taggart, there’s no electric light bulbs to be had anywhere within two hundred miles of us!”

But five million dollars was being spent by the office of Morale Conditioning on the People’s Opera Company, which traveled through the country, giving free performances to people who, on one meal a day, could not afford the energy to walk to the opera house. Seven million dollars had been granted to a psychologist in charge of a project to solve the world crisis by research into the nature of brother-love. Ten million dollars had been granted to the manufacturer of a new electronic cigarette lighter—but there were no cigarettes in the shops of the country. There were flashlights on the market, but no batteries; there were radios, but no tubes; there were cameras, but no film. The production of airplanes had been declared “temporarily suspended.” Air travel for private purposes had been forbidden, and reserved exclusively for missions of “public need.” An industrialist traveling to save his factory was not considered as publicly needed and could not get aboard a plane; an official traveling to collect taxes was and could.

“People are stealing nuts and bolts out of rail plates, Miss Taggart, stealing them at night, and our stock is running out, the division storehouse is bare, what are we to do, Miss Taggart?”

But a super-color-four-foot-screen television set was being erected for tourists in a People’s Park in Washington—and a super-cyclotron for the study of cosmic rays was being erected at the State Science Institute, to be completed in ten years.

“The trouble with our modern world,” Dr. Robert Stadler said over the radio, at the ceremonies launching the construction of the cyclotron, “is that too many people think too much. It is the cause of all our current fears and doubts. An enlightened citizenry should abandon the superstitious worship of logic and the outmoded reliance on reason.

Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors and electronics to engineers, so people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the experts and have faith in the experts’ higher authority. Only experts are able to understand the discoveries of modern science, which have proved that thought is an illusion and that the mind is a myth.”

“This age of misery is God’s punishment to man for the sin of relying on his mind!” snarled the triumphant voices of mystics of every sect and sort, on street corners, in rain-soaked tents, in crumbling temples. “This world ordeal is the result of man’s attempt to live by reason! This is where thinking, logic and science have brought you! And there’s to be no salvation until men realize that their mortal mind is impotent to solve their problems and go back to faith, faith in God, faith in a higher authority!”

And confronting her daily there was the final product of it all, the heir and collector—Cuffy Meigs, the man impervious to thought.

Cuffy Meigs strode through the offices of Taggart Transcontinental, wearing a semi-military tunic and slapping a shiny leather briefcase against his shiny leather leggings. He carried an automatic pistol in one pocket and a rabbit’s foot in the other.

Cuffy Meigs tried to avoid her; his manner was part scorn, as if he considered her an impractical idealist, part superstitious awe, as if she possessed some incomprehensible power with which he preferred not to tangle. He acted as if her presence did not belong to his view of a railroad, yet as if hers were the one presence he dared not challenge.

There was a touch of impatient resentment in his manner toward Jim, as if it were Jim’s duty to deal with her and to protect him; just as he expected Jim to keep the railroad in running order and leave him free for activities of more practical a nature, so he expected Jim to keep her in line, as part of the equipment.

Beyond the window of her office, like a patch of adhesive plaster stuck over a wound on the sky, the page of the calendar hung blank in the distance. The calendar had never been repaired since the night of Francisco’s farewell. The officials who had rushed to the tower, that night, had knocked the calendar’s motor to a stop, while tearing the film out of the projector. They had found the small square of Francisco’s message, pasted into the strip of numbered days, but who had pasted it there, who had entered the locked room and when and how, was never discovered by the three commissions still investigating the case. Pending the outcome of their efforts, the page hung blank and still above the city.

It was blank on the afternoon of September 14, when the telephone rang in her office. “A man from Minnesota,” said the voice of her secretary.

She had told her secretary that she would accept all calls of this kind. They were the appeals for help and her only source of information. At a time when the voices of railroad officials uttered nothing but sounds designed to avoid communication, the voices of nameless men were her last link to the system, the last sparks of reason and tortured honesty flashing briefly through the miles of Taggart track.

“Miss Taggart, it is not my place to call you, but nobody else will,” said the voice that came on the wire, this time; the voice sounded young and too calm. “In another day or two, a disaster’s going to happen here the like of which they’ve never seen, and they won’t be able to hide it any longer, only it will be too late by then, and maybe it’s too late already.”

“What is it? Who are you?”

“One of your employees of the Minnesota Division, Miss Taggart.

In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here—and you know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the biggest harvest we’ve ever had. They’ll stop, because we have no cars. The harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year.”

“What did you say?” She felt as if minutes went by between the words of the unnatural voice that did not sound like her own.

“The cars have not been sent. Fifteen thousand should have been here by now. As far as I could learn, about eight thousand cars is all we got. I’ve been calling Division Headquarters for a week. They’ve been telling me not to worry. Last time, they told me to mind my own damn business. Every shed, silo, elevator, warehouse, garage and dance hall along the track is filled with wheat. At the Sherman elevators, there’s a line of farmers’ trucks and wagons two miles long, waiting on the road. At Lakewood Station, the square is packed solid and has been for three nights. They keep telling us it’s only temporary, the cars are coming and we’ll catch up. We won’t. There aren’t any cars coming.

I’ve called everyone I could. I know, by the way they answer. They know, and not one of them wants to admit it. They’re scared, scared to move or speak or ask or answer. All they’re thinking of is who will be blamed when that harvest rots here around the stations—and not of who’s going to move it. Maybe nobody can, now. Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it, either. But I thought you’re the only person left who’d want to know and that somebody had to tell you.”

“I...” She made an effort to breathe. “I see... Who are you?”

“The name wouldn’t matter. When I hang up, I will have become a deserter. I don’t want to stay here to see it when it happens. I don’t want any part of it any more. Good luck to you, Miss Taggart.”

She heard the click. “Thank you,” she said over a dead wire.

The next time she noticed the office around her and permitted herself to feel, it was noon of the following day. She stood in the middle of the office, running stiff, spread fingers through a strand of hair, brushing it back off her face—and for an instant, she wondered where she was and what was the unbelievable thing that had happened in the last twenty hours. What she felt was horror, and she knew that she had felt it from the first words of the man on the wire, only there had been no time to know it.

There was not much that remained in her mind of the last twenty hours, only disconnected bits, held together by the single constant that had made them possible—by the soft, loose faces of men who fought to hide from themselves that they knew the answers to the questions she asked.

From the moment when she was told that the manager of the Car Service Department had been out of town for a week and had left no address where one could reach him—she knew that the report of the man from Minnesota was true. Then came the faces of the assistants in the Car Service Department, who would neither confirm the report nor deny it, but kept showing her papers, orders, forms, file cards that bore words in the English language, but no connection to intelligible facts. “Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?” “Form 357W is filled out in every particular, as required by the office of the Co-ordinator in conformance with the instructions of the comptroller and by Directive 11-493.”

“Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?” “The entries for the months of August and September have been processed by—” “Were the freight cars sent to Minnesota?” “My files indicate the locations of freight cars by state, date, classification and—” “Do you know whether the cars were sent to Minnesota?” “As to the interstate motion of freight cars, I would have to refer you to the files of Mr. Benson and of—”

There was nothing to learn from the files. There were careful entries, each conveying four possible meanings, with references which led to references which led to a final reference which was missing from the files. It did not take her long to discover that the cars had not been sent to Minnesota and that the order had come from Cuffy Meigs—but who had carried it out, who had tangled the trail, what steps had been taken by what compliant men to preserve the appearance of a safely normal operation, without a single cry of protest to arouse some braver man’s attention, who had falsified the reports, and where the cars had gone—seemed, at first, impossible to learn.

Through the hours of that night—while a small, desperate crew under the command of Eddie Willers kept calling every division point, every yard, depot, station, spur and siding of Taggart Transcontinental for every freight car in sight or reach, ordering them to unload, drop, dump, scuttle anything and proceed to Minnesota at once, while they kept calling the yards, stations and presidents of every railroad still half in existence anywhere across the map, begging for cars for Minnesota—she went through the task of tracing from face to coward’s face the destination of the freight cars that had vanished.

She went from railroad executives to wealthy shippers to Washington officials and back to the railroad—by cab, by phone, by wire—pursuing a trail of half-uttered hints. The trail approached its end when she heard the pinch-lipped voice of a public relations woman in a Washington office, saying resentfully over the telephone wire, “Well, after all, it is a matter of opinion whether wheat is essential to a nation’s welfare—there are those of more progressive views who feel that the soybean is, perhaps, of far greater value”—and then, by noon, she stood in the middle of her office, knowing that the freight cars intended for the wheat of Minnesota had been sent, instead, to carry the soybeans from the Louisiana swamps of Kip’s Ma’s project.

The first story of the Minnesota disaster appeared in the newspapers three days later. It reported that the farmers who had waited in the streets of Lakewood for six days, with no place to store their wheat and no trains to carry it, had demolished the local courthouse, the mayor’s home and the railroad station. Then the stories vanished abruptly and the newspapers kept silent, then began to print admonitions urging people not to believe unpatriotic rumors.

While the flour mills and grain markets of the country were screaming over the phones and the telegraph wires, sending pleas to New York and delegations to Washington, while strings of freight cars from random corners of the continent were crawling like rusty caterpillars across the map in the direction of Minnesota—the wheat and hope of the country were waiting to perish along an empty track, under the unchanging green lights of signals that called for motion to trains that were not there.

At the communication desks of Taggart Transcontinental, a small crew kept calling for freight cars, repeating, like the crew of a sinking ship, an S.O.S, that remained unheard. There were freight cars held loaded for months in the yards of the companies owned by the friends of pull-peddlers, who ignored the frantic demands to unload the cars and release them. “You can tell that railroad to—” followed by untransmissible words, was the message of the Smather Brothers of Arizona in answer to the S.O.S. of New York.

In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars, into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went moving into track-side ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in the explosions set off by burning journal boxes.

They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff, incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them; there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had destroyed them. There was only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways.

The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses—moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them—moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.

The men in Washington were last to be reached by the panic. They watched, not the news from Minnesota, but the precarious balance of their friendships and commitments; they weighed, not the fate of the harvest, but the unknowable result of unpredictable emotions in unthinking men of unlimited power. They waited, they evaded all pleas, they declared, “Oh, ridiculous, there’s nothing to worry about! Those Taggart people have always moved that wheat on schedule, they’ll find some way to move it!”

Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota.

An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip’s Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma’s freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket.

In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night.

Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smouldering piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt: they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him.

The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals.

It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail. The red and green lenses remained red and green, not with the living radiance of sight, but with the dead stare of glass eyes. On the edge of the city, a cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew through the minutes of stillness, like blood dammed by a clot inside a vein, unable to rush into the chambers of the heart.

Dagny, that night, was sitting at a table in a private dining room of the Wayne-Falkland. The wax of candles was dripping down on the white camellias and laurel leaves at the base of the silver candlesticks, arithmetical calculations were penciled on the damask linen tablecloth, and a cigar butt was swimming in a finger bowl. The six men in formal dinner jackets, facing her about the table, were Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Clem Weatherby, James Taggart and Cuffy Meigs.

“Why?” she had asked, when Jim had told her that she had to attend that dinner. “Well... because our Board of Directors is to meet next week.” “And?” “You’re interested in what’s going to be decided about our Minnesota Line, aren’t you?” “Is that going to be decided at the Board meeting?” “Well, not exactly.” “Is it going to be decided at this dinner?” “Not exactly, but... oh, why do you always have to be so definite? Nothing’s ever definite. Besides, they insisted that they wanted you to come.” “Why?” “Isn’t that sufficient?”

She did not ask why those men chose to make all their crucial decisions at parties of this kind; she knew that they did. She knew that behind the clattering, lumbering pretense of their council sessions, committee meetings and mass debates, the decisions were made in advance, in furtive informality, at luncheons, dinners and bars, the graver the issue, the more casual the method of settling it. It was the first time that they had asked her, the outsider, the enemy, to one of those secret sessions; it was, she thought, an acknowledgment of the fact that they needed her and, perhaps, the first step of their surrender; it was a chance she could not leave untaken.

But as she sat in the candlelight of the dining room, she felt certain that she had no chance; she felt restlessly unable to accept that certainty, since she could not grasp its reason, yet lethargically reluctant to pursue any inquiry.

“As, I think, you will concede, Miss Taggart, there now seems to be no economic justification for the continued existence of a railroad line in Minnesota, which...” “And even Miss Taggart will, I’m sure, agree that certain temporary retrenchments seem to be indicated, until...” “Nobody, not even Miss Taggart, will deny that there are times when it is necessary to sacrifice the parts for the sake of the whole...” As she listened to the mentions of her name tossed into the conversation at half-hour intervals, tossed perfunctorily, with the speaker’s eyes never glancing in her direction, she wondered what motive had made them want her to be present. It was not an attempt to delude her into believing that they were consulting her, but worse: an attempt to delude themselves into believing that she had agreed. They asked her questions at times and interrupted her before she had completed the first sentence of the answer. They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.

Some crudely childish form of self-deception had made them choose to give to this occasion the decorous setting of a formal dinner. They acted as if they hoped to gain, from the objects of gracious luxury, the power and the honor of which those objects had once been the product and symbol—they acted, she thought, like those savages who devour the corpse of an adversary in the hope of acquiring his strength and his virtue.

She regretted that she was dressed as she was. “It’s formal,” Jim had told her, “but don’t overdo it... what I mean is, don’t look too rich... business people should avoid any appearance of arrogance these days... not that you should look shabby, but if you could just seem to suggest... well, humility... it would please them, you know, it would make them feel big.” “Really?” she had said, turning away.

She wore a black dress that looked as if it were no more than a piece of cloth crossed over her breasts and falling to her feet in the soft folds of a Grecian tunic; it was made of satin, a satin so light and thin that it could have served as the stuff of a nightgown. The luster of the cloth, streaming and shifting with her movements, made it look as if the light of the room she entered were her personal property, sensitively obedient to the motions of her body, wrapping her in a sheet of radiance more luxurious than the texture of brocade, underscoring the pliant fragility of her figure, giving her an air of so natural an elegance that it could afford to be scornfully casual. She wore a single piece of jewelry, a diamond clip at the edge of the black neckline, that kept flashing with the imperceptible motion of her breath, like a transformer converting a flicker into fire, making one conscious, not of the gems, but of the living beat behind them; it flashed like a military decoration, like wealth worn as a badge of honor. She wore no other ornament, only the sweep of a black velvet cape, more arrogantly, ostentatiously patrician than any spread of sables.

She regretted it now, as she looked at the men before her; she felt the embarrassing guilt of pointlessness, as if she had tried to defy the figures in a waxworks. She saw a mindless resentment in their eyes and a sneaking trace of the lifeless, sexless, smutty leer with which men look at a poster advertising burlesque.

“It’s a great responsibility,” said Eugene Lawson, “to hold the decision of life or death over thousands of people and to sacrifice them when necessary, but we mast have the courage to do it.” His soft lips seemed to twist into a smile.

“The only factors to consider are land acreage and population figures,” said Dr. Ferris in a statistical voice, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. “Since it is no longer possible to maintain both the Minnesota Line and the transcontinental traffic of this railroad, the choice is between Minnesota and those states west of the Rockies which were cut off by the failure of the Taggart Tunnel, as well as the neighboring states of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, which means, practically speaking, the whole of the Northwest. When you compute the acreage and the number of heads in both areas, it’s obvious that we should scuttle Minnesota rather than give up our lines of communication over a third of a continent.”

“I won’t give up the continent,” said Wesley Mouch, staring down at his dish of ice cream, his voice hurt and stubborn.

She was thinking of the Mesabi Range, the last of the major sources of iron ore, she was thinking of the Minnesota farmers, such as were left of them, the best producers of wheat in the country—she was thinking that the end of Minnesota would end Wisconsin, then Michigan, then Illinois—she was seeing the red breath of the factories dying out over the industrial East—as against the empty miles of western sands, of scraggly pastures and abandoned ranches.

“The figures indicate,” said Mr. Weatherby primly, “that the continued maintenance of both areas seems to be impossible. The railway track and equipment of one has to be dismantled to provide the material for the maintenance of the other.”

She noticed that Clem Weatherby, their technical expert on railroads, was the man of least influence among them, and Cuffy Meigs—of most.

Cuffy Meigs sat sprawled in his chair, with a look of patronizing tolerance for their game of wasting time on discussions. He spoke little, but when he did, it was to snap decisively, with a contemptuous grin, “Pipe down, Jimmy!” or, “Nuts, Wes, you’re talking through your hat!” She noticed that neither Jim nor Mouch resented it. They seemed to welcome the authority of his assurance; they were accepting him as their master.

“We have to be practical,” Dr. Ferris kept saying. “We have to be scientific.”

“I need the economy of the country as a whole,” Wesley Mouch kept repeating. “I need the production of a nation.”

“Is it economics that you’re talking about? Is it production?” she said, whenever her cold, measured voice was able to seize a brief stretch of their tune. “If it is, then give us leeway to save the Eastern states. That’s all that’s left of the country—and of the world. If you let us save that, we’ll have a chance to rebuild the rest. If not, it’s the end.

Let the Atlantic Southern take care of such transcontinental traffic as still exists. Let the local railroads take care of the Northwest. But let Taggart Transcontinental drop everything else—yes, everything—and devote all our resources, equipment and rail to the traffic of the Eastern states. Let us shrink back to the start of this country, but let us hold that start. We’ll run no trains west of the Missouri. We’ll become a local railroad—the local of the industrial East. Let us save our industries.

There’s nothing left to save in the West. You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country’s industrial plant—and centuries of effort won’t be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start. How do you expect our industries—or railroads—to survive without steel? How do you expect any steel to be produced if you cut off the supply of iron ore? Save Minnesota, whatever’s left of it. The country? You have no country to save, if its industries perish. You can sacrifice a leg or an arm. You can’t save a body by sacrificing its heart and brain. Save our industries. Save Minnesota. Save the Eastern Seaboard.”

It was no use. She said it as many times, with as many details, statistics, figures, proofs, as she could force out of her weary mind into their evasive hearing. It was no use. They neither refuted nor agreed; they merely looked as if her arguments were beside the point. There was a sound of hidden emphasis in their answers, as if they were giving her an explanation, but in a code to which she had no key.

“There’s trouble in California,” said Wesley Mouch sullenly. “Their state legislature’s been acting pretty huffy. There’s talk of seceding from the Union.”

“Oregon is overrun by gangs of deserters,” said Clem Weatherby cautiously. “They murdered two tax collectors within the last three months.”

“The importance of industry to a civilization has been grossly overemphasized,” said Dr. Ferris dreamily. “What is now known as the People’s State of India has existed for centuries without any industrial development whatever.”

“People could do with fewer material gadgets and a sterner discipline of privations,” said Eugene Lawson eagerly. “It would be good for them.”

“Oh hell, are you going to let that dame talk you into letting the richest country on earth slip through your fingers?” said Cuffy Meigs, leaping to his feet. “It’s a fine time to give up a whole continent—and in exchange for what? For a dinky little state that’s milked dry, anyway!

I say ditch Minnesota, but hold onto your transcontinental dragnet.

With trouble and riots everywhere, you won’t be able to keep people in line unless you have transportation—troop transportation—unless you hold your soldiers within a few days’ journey of any point on the continent. This is no time to retrench. Don’t get yellow, listening to all that talk. You’ve got the country in your pocket. Just keep it there.”

“In the long run—” Mouch started uncertainly.

“In the long run, we’ll all be dead,” snapped Cuffy Meigs. He was pacing restlessly. “Retrenching, hell! There’s plenty of pickings left in California and Oregon and all those places. What I’ve been thinking is, we ought to think of expanding—the way things are, there’s nobody to stop us, it’s there for the taking—Mexico, and Canada maybe—it ought to be a cinch.”

Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away—the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems.

She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men’s urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories value. She, born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their secret, furtive souls, knew not by means of thought, but by means of that nameless muck which they called their instincts and emotions: that so long as men struggle to stay alive, they’ll never produce so little but that the man with the club won’t be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit—that the harder their work and the less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit—that men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are—that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People’s State of India.

She saw what they wanted and to what goal their “instincts,” which they called unaccountable, were leading them. She saw that Eugene Lawson, the humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation—and Dr. Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the hand-plow.

Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state—indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it as human any longer. They went on talking, but she was unable to speak or to listen. She caught herself feeling that her only desire was now to get home and fall asleep.

“Miss Taggart,” said a politely rational, faintly anxious voice—and jerking her head up, she saw the courteous figure of a waiter, “the assistant manager of the Taggart Terminal is on the telephone, requesting permission to speak to you at once. He says it’s an emergency.”

It was a relief to leap to her feet and get out of that room, even if in answer to the call of some new disaster. It was a relief to hear the assistant manager’s voice, even though it was saying, “The interlocker system is out, Miss Taggart. The signals are dead. There are eight incoming trains held up and six outgoing. We can’t move them in or out of the tunnels, we can’t find the chief engineer, we can’t locate the breach of the circuit, we have no copper wire for repairs, we don’t know what to do, we—”

“I’ll be right down,” she said, dropping the receiver.

Hurrying to the elevator, then half-running through the stately lobby of the Wayne-Falkland, she felt herself returning to life at the summons of the possibility of action.

Taxicabs were rare, these days, and none came in answer to the doorman’s whistle. She started rapidly down the street, forgetting what she wore, wondering why the touch of the wind seemed too cold and too ultimately close.

Her mind on the Terminal ahead, she was startled by the loveliness of a sudden sight: she saw the slender figure of a woman hurrying toward her, the ray of a lamppost sweeping over lustrous hair, naked arms, the swirl of a black cape and the flame of a diamond on her breast, with the long, empty corridor of a city street behind her and skyscrapers drawn by lonely dots of light. The knowledge that she was seeing her own reflection in the side mirror of a florist’s window, came an instant too late: she had felt the enchantment of the full context to which that image and city belonged. Then she felt a stab of desolate loneliness, much wider a loneliness than the span of an empty street—and a stab of anger at herself, at the preposterous contrast between her appearance and the context of this night and age.

She saw a taxi turn a corner, she waved to it and leaped in, slamming the door against a feeling which she hoped to leave behind her, on the empty pavement by a florist’s window. But she knew—in self mockery, in bitterness, in longing—that this feeling was the sense of expectation she had felt at her first ball and at those rare times when she had wanted the outward beauty of existence to match its inner splendor. What a time to think of it! she told herself in mockery—not now! she cried to herself in anger—but a desolate voice kept asking her quietly to the rattle of the taxi’s wheels: You who believed you must live for your happiness, what do you now have left of it?—what are you gaining from your struggle?—yes! say it honestly: what’s in it for you?—or are you becoming one of those abject altruists who has no answer to that question any longer?... Not now!—she ordered, as the glowing entrance to the Taggart Terminal flared up in the rectangle of the taxi’s windshield.

The men in the Terminal manager’s office were like extinguished signals, as if here, too, a circuit were broken and there were no living current to make them move. They looked at her with a kind of inanimate passivity, as if it made no difference whether she let them stay still or threw a switch to set them in motion.

The Terminal manager was absent. The chief engineer could not be found; he had been seen at the Terminal two hours ago, not since. The assistant manager had exhausted his power of initiative by volunteering to call her. The others volunteered nothing. The signal engineer was a college-boyish man in his thirties, who kept saying aggressively, “But this has never happened before, Miss Taggart! The interlocker has never failed. It’s not supposed to fail. We know our jobs, we can take care of it as well as anybody can—but not if it breaks down when it’s not supposed to!” She could not tell whether the dispatcher, an elderly man with years of railroad work behind him, still retained his intelligence but chose to hide it, or whether months of suppressing it had choked it for good, granting him the safety of stagnation.

“We don’t know what to do, Miss Taggart.”

“We don’t know whom to call for what sort of permission.”

“There are no rules to cover an emergency of this kind.”

“There aren’t even any rules about who’s to lay down the rules for it!”

She listened, she reached for the telephone without a word of explanation, she ordered the operator to get her the operating vice-President of the Atlantic Southern in Chicago, to get him at his home and out of bed, if necessary.

“George? Dagny Taggart,” she said, when the voice of her competitor came on the wire. “Will you lend me the signal engineer of your Chicago terminal, Charles Murray, for twenty-four hours?...

Yes... Right... Put him aboard a plane and get him here as fast as you can. Tell him we’ll pay three thousand dollars... Yes, for the one day... Yes, as bad as that... Yes, I’ll pay him in cash, out of my own pocket, if necessary. I’ll pay whatever it takes to bribe his way aboard a plane, but get him on the first plane out of Chicago... No, George, not one—not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental... Yes, I’ll get all the papers, exemptions, exceptions and emergency permissions... Thanks, George. So long.”

She hung up and spoke rapidly to the men before her, not to hear the stillness of the room and of the Terminal, where no sound of wheels was beating any longer, not to hear the bitter words which the stillness seemed to repeat: Not a single mind left on Taggart Transcontinental...

“Get a wrecking train and crew ready at once,” she said. “Send them out on the Hudson Line, with orders to tear down every foot of copper wire, any copper wire, lights, signals, telephone, everything that’s company property. Have it here by morning.” “But, Miss Taggart! Our service on the Hudson Line is only temporarily suspended and the Unification Board has refused us permission to dismantle the line!” “I’ll be responsible.” “But how are we going to get the wrecking train out of here, when there aren’t any signals?” “There will be signals in half an hour.” “How?” “Come on,” she said, rising to her feet.

They followed her as she hurried down the passenger platforms, past the huddling, shifting groups of travelers by the motionless trains. She hurried down a narrow catwalk, through a maze of rail, past blinded signals and frozen switches, with nothing but the beat of her satin sandals to fill the great vaults of the underground tunnels of Taggart Transcontinental, with the hollow creaking of planks under the slower steps of men trailing her like a reluctant echo—she hurried to the lighted glass cube of Tower A, that hung in the darkness like a crown without a body, the crown of a deposed ruler above a realm of empty tracks.

The tower director was too expert a man at too exacting a job to be able wholly to conceal the dangerous burden of intelligence. He understood what she wanted him to do from her first few words and answered only with an abrupt “Yes, ma’am,” but he was bent over his charts by the time the others came following her up the iron stairway, he was grimly at work on the most humiliating job of calculation he had ever had to perform in his long career. She knew how fully he understood it, from a single glance he threw at her, a glance of indignation and endurance that matched some emotion he had caught in her face, “We’ll do it first and feel about it afterwards,” she said, even though he had made no comment. “Yes, ma’am,” he answered woodenly.

His room, on the top of an underground tower, was like a glass verandah overlooking what had once been the swiftest, richest and most orderly stream in the world. He had been trained to chart the course of over ninety trains an hour and to watch them roll safely through a maze of tracks and switches in and out of the Terminal, under his glass walls and his fingertips. Now, for the first time, he was looking out at the empty darkness of a dried channel.

Through the open door of the relay room, she saw the tower men standing grimly idle—the men whose jobs had never permitted a moment’s relaxation—standing by the long rows that looked like vertical copper pleats, like shelves of books and as much of a monument to human intelligence. The pull of one of the small levers, which protruded like bookmarks from the shelves, threw thousands of electric circuits into motion, made thousands of contacts and broke as many others, set dozens of switches to clear a chosen course and dozens of signals to light it, with no error left possible, no chance, no contradiction—an enormous complexity of thought condensed into one movement of a human hand to set and insure the course of a train, that hundreds of trains might safely rush by, that thousands of tons of metal and lives might pass in speeding streaks a breath away from one another, protected by nothing but a thought, the thought of the man who devised the levers. But they—she looked at the face of her signal engineer—they believed that that muscular contraction of a hand was the only thing required to move the traffic—and now the tower men stood idle—and on the great panels in front of the tower director, the red and green lights, which had flashed announcing the progress of trains at a distance of miles, were now so many glass beads—like the glass beads for which another breed of savages had once sold the Island of Manhattan.

“Calf all of your unskilled laborers,” she said to the assistant manager, “the section hands, trackwalkers, engine wipers, whoever’s in the Terminal right now, and have them come here at once.”

“Here?”

“Here,” she said, pointing at the tracks outside the tower. “Call all your switchmen, too. Phone your storehouse and have them bring here every lantern they can lay their hands on, any sort of lantern, conductors’ lanterns, storm lanterns, anything.”

“Lanterns, Miss Taggart?”

“Get going.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What is it we’re doing, Miss Taggart?” asked the dispatcher.

“We’re going to move trains and we’re going “to move them manually.”

“Manually?” said the signal engineer.

“Yes, brother! Now why should you be shocked?” She could not resist it. “Man is only muscles, isn’t he? We’re going back—back to where there were no interlocking systems, no semaphores, no electricity—back to the time when train signals were not steel and wire, but men holding lanterns. Physical men, serving as lampposts. You’ve advocated it long enough—you got what you wanted. Oh, you thought that your tools would determine your ideas? But it happens to be the other way around—and now you’re going to see the kind of tools your ideas have determined!”

But even to go back took an act of intelligence—she thought, feeling the paradox of her own position, as she looked at the lethargy of the faces around her.

“How will we work the switches, Miss Taggart?”

“By hand.”

“And the signals?”

“By hand.”

“How?”

“By placing a man with a lantern at every signal post.”

“How? There’s not enough clearance.”

“We’ll use alternate tracks.”

“How will the men know which way to throw the switches?”

“By written orders.”

“Uh?”

“By written orders—just as in the old days.” She pointed to the tower director. “He’s working out a schedule of how to move the trains and which tracks to use. He’ll write out an order for every signal and switch, he’ll pick some men as runners and they’ll keep delivering the orders to every post—and it will take hours to do what used to take minutes, but we’ll get those waiting trains into the Terminal and out on the road—”

“We’re to work it that way all night?”

“And all day tomorrow—until the engineer who’s got the brains for it, shows you how to repair the interlocker.”

“There’s nothing in the union contracts about men standing with lanterns. There’s going to be trouble. The union will object.”

“Let them come to me.”

“The Unification Board will object.”

“I’ll be responsible.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be held for giving the orders—”

“I’ll give the orders.”

She stepped out on the landing of the iron stairway that hung on the side of the tower; she was fighting for self-control. It seemed to her for a moment as if she, too, were a precision instrument of high technology, left without electric current, trying to run a transcontinental railroad by means of her two hands. She looked out at the great, silent darkness of the Taggart underground—and she felt a stab of burning humiliation that she should now see it brought down to the level where human lampposts would stand in its tunnels as its last memorial statues.

She could barely distinguish the faces of the men when they gathered at the foot of the tower. They came streaming silently through the darkness and stood without moving in the bluish murk, with blue bulbs on the walls behind them and patches of light falling on their shoulders from the tower’s windows. She could see the greasy garments, the slack, muscular bodies, the limply hanging arms of men drained by the unrewarding exhaustion of a labor that required no thought. These were the dregs of the railroad, the younger men who could now seek no chance to rise and the older men who had never wanted to seek it.

They stood in silence, not with the apprehensive curiosity of workmen, but with the heavy indifference of convicts.

“The orders which you are about to receive have come from me,” she said, standing above them on the iron stairs, speaking with resonant clarity. “The men who’ll issue them are acting under my instructions.

The interlocking control system has broken down. It will now be replaced by human labor. Train service will be resumed at once.”

She noticed some faces in the crowd staring at her with a peculiar look: with a veiled resentment and the kind of insolent curiosity that made her suddenly conscious of being a woman. Then she remembered what she wore, and thought that it did look preposterous—and then, at the sudden stab of some violent impulse that felt like defiance and like loyalty to the full, real meaning of the moment, she threw her cape back and stood in the raw glare of light, under the sooted columns, like a figure at a formal reception, sternly erect, flaunting the luxury of naked arms, of glowing black satin, of a diamond flashing like a military cross.

“The tower director will assign switchmen to their posts. He will select men for the job of signaling trains by means of lanterns and for the task of transmitting his orders. Trains will—”

She was fighting to drown a bitter voice that seemed to be saying: That’s all they’re fit for, these men, if even that... there’s not a single mind left anywhere on Taggart Transcontinental...

“Trains will continue to be moved in and out of the Terminal. You will remain at your posts until—”

Then she stopped. It was his eyes and hair that she saw first—the ruthlessly perceptive eyes, the streaks of hair shaded from gold to copper that seemed to reflect the glow of sunlight in the murk of the underground—she saw John Galt among the chain gang of the mindless, John Galt in greasy overalls and rolled shirt sleeves, she saw his weightless way of standing, his face held lifted, his eyes looking at her as if he had seen this moment many moments ago.

“What’s the matter, Miss Taggart?”

It was the soft voice of the tower director, who stood by her side, with some sort of paper in his hand—and she thought it was strange to emerge from a span of unconsciousness which had been the span of the sharpest awareness she had ever experienced, only she did not know how long it had lasted or where she was or why. She had been aware of Galt’s face, she had been seeing, in the shape of his mouth, in the planes of his cheeks, the crackup of that implacable serenity which had always been his, but he still retained it in his look of acknowledging the breach, of admitting that this moment was too much even for him.

She knew that she went on speaking, because those around her looked as if they were listening, though she could not hear a sound, she went on speaking as if carrying out a hypnotic order given to herself some endless time ago, knowing only that the completion of that order was a form of defiance against him, neither knowing nor hearing her own words.

She felt as if she were standing in a radiant silence where sight was her only capacity and his face was its only object, and the sight of his face was like a speech in the form of a pressure at the base of her throat. It seemed so natural that he should be here, it seemed so unendurably simple—she felt as if the shock were not his presence, but the presence of others on the tracks of her railroad, where he belonged and they did not. She was seeing those moments aboard a train when, at its plunge into the tunnels, she had felt a sudden, solemn tension, as if this place were showing her in naked simplicity the essence of her railroad and of her life, the union of consciousness and matter, the frozen form of a mind’s ingenuity giving physical existence to its purpose; she had felt a sense of sudden hope, as if this place held the meaning of all of her values, and a sense of secret excitement, as if a nameless promise were awaiting her under the ground—it was right that she should now meet him here, he had been the meaning and the promise—she was not seeing his clothing any longer, nor to what level her railroad had reduced him—she was seeing only the vanishing torture of the months when he had been outside her reach—she was seeing in his face the confession of what those months had cost him—the only speech she heard was as if she were saying to him: This is the reward for all my days—and as if he were answering: For all of mine.

She knew that she had finished speaking to the strangers when she saw that the tower director had stepped forward and was saying something to them, glancing at a list in his hand. Then, drawn by a sense of irresistible certainty, she found herself descending the stairs, slipping away from the crowd, not toward the platforms and the exit, but into the darkness of the abandoned tunnels. You will follow me, she thought—and felt as if the thought were not in words, but in the tension of her muscles, the tension of her will to accomplish a thing she knew to be outside her power, yet she knew with certainty that it would be accomplished and by her wish... no, she thought, not by her wish, but by its total rightness. You will follow me—it was neither plea nor prayer nor demand, but the quiet statement of a fact, it contained the whole of her power of knowledge and the whole of the knowledge she had earned through the years. You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can’t let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached. You will follow me—she felt an exultant assurance, which was neither hope nor faith, but an act of worship for the logic of existence.

She was hurrying down the remnants of abandoned rails, down the long, dark corridors twisting through granite. She lost the sound of the director’s voice behind her. Then she felt the beat of her arteries and heard, in answering rhythm, the beat of the city above her head, but she felt as if she heard the motion of her blood as a sound filling the silence, and the motion of the city as the beat inside her body—and, far behind her, she heard the sound of steps. She did not glance back.

She went faster.

She went past the locked iron door where the remnant of his motor was still hidden, she did not stop, but a faint shudder was her answer to the sudden glimpse of the unity and logic in the events of the last two years. A string of blue lights went on into the darkness, over patches of glistening granite, over broken sandbags spilling drifts on the rails, over rusty piles of scrap metal. When she heard the steps coming closer, she stopped and turned to look back.

She saw a sweep of blue light flash briefly on the shining strands of Galt’s hair, she caught the pale outline of his face and the dark hollows of his eyes. The face disappeared, but the sound of his steps served as the link to the next blue light that swept across the line of his eyes, the eyes that remained held level, directed ahead—and she felt certain that she had stayed in his sight from the moment he had seen her at the tower.

She heard the beat of the city above them—these tunnels, she had once thought, were the roots of the city and of all the motion reaching to the sky—but they, she thought, John Galt and she, were the living power within these roots, they were the start and aim and meaning—he, too, she thought, heard the beat of the city as the beat of his body.

She threw her cape back, she stood defiantly straight, as he had seen her stand on the steps of the tower—as he had seen her for the first time, ten years ago, here, under the ground—she was hearing the words of his confession, not as words, but by means of that beating which made it so difficult to breathe: You looked like a symbol of luxury and you belonged in the place that was its source... you seemed to bring the enjoyment of life back to its rightful owners... you had a look of energy and of its reward, together... and I was the first man who had ever stated in what manner these two were inseparable...

The next span of moments was like flashes of light in stretches of blinded unconsciousness—the moment when she saw his face, as he stopped beside her, when she saw the unastonished calm, the leashed intensity, the laughter of understanding in the dark green eyes—the moment when she knew what he saw in her face, by the tight, drawn harshness of his lips—the moment when she felt his mouth on hers, when she felt the shape of his mouth both as an absolute shape and as a liquid filling her body—then the motion of his lips down the line of her throat, a drinking motion that left a trail of bruises—then the sparkle of her diamond clip against the trembling copper of his hair.

Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by direct perception. Just as her eyes had the power to translate wave lengths of energy into sight, just as her ears had the power to translate vibrations into sound, so her body now had the power to translate the energy that had moved all the choices of her life, into immediate sensory perception. It was not the pressure of a hand that made her tremble, but the instantaneous sum of its meaning, the knowledge that it was his hand, that it moved as if her flesh were his possession, that its movement was his signature of acceptance under the whole of that achievement which was herself—it was only a sensation of physical pleasure, but it contained her worship of him, of everything that was his person and his life—from the night of the mass meeting in a factory in Wisconsin, to the Atlantis of a valley hidden in the Rocky Mountains, to the triumphant mockery of the green eyes of the superlative intelligence above a worker’s figure at the foot of the tower—it contained her pride in herself and that it should be she whom he had chosen as his mirror, that it should be her body which was now giving him the sum of his existence, as his body was giving her the sum of hers. These were the things it contained—but what she knew was only the sensation of the movement of his hand on her breasts.

He tore off her cape and she felt the slenderness of her own body by means of the circle of his arms, as if his person were only a tool for her triumphant awareness of herself, but that self were only a tool for her awareness of him. It was as if she were reaching the limit of her capacity to feel, yet what she felt was like a cry of impatient demand, which she was now incapable of naming, except that it had the same quality of ambition as the course of her life, the same inexhaustible quality of radiant greed.

He pulled her head back for a moment, to look straight into her eyes, to let her see his, to let her know the full meaning of their actions, as if throwing the spotlight of consciousness upon them for the meeting of their eyes in a moment of intimacy greater than the one to come.

Then she felt the mesh of burlap striking the skin of her shoulders, she found herself lying on the broken sandbags, she saw the long, tight gleam of her stockings, she felt his mouth pressed to her ankle, then rising in a tortured motion up the line of her leg, as if he wished to own its shape by means of his lips, then she felt her teeth sinking into the flesh of his arm, she felt the sweep of his elbow knocking her head aside and his mouth seizing her lips with a pressure more viciously painful than hers—then she felt, when it hit her throat, that which she knew only as an upward streak of motion that released and united her body into a single shock of pleasure—then she knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving greed that went reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer, only a sensation of endless reaching for the impossible—then she knew that it was possible, and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be desired, ever.

He lay beside her, on his back, looking up at the darkness of the granite vault above them, she saw him stretched on the jagged slant of sandbags as if his body were fluid in relaxation, she saw the black wedge of her cape flung across the rails at their feet, there were beads of moisture twinkling on the vault, shifting slowly, running into invisible cracks, like the lights of a distant traffic. When he spoke, his voice sounded as if he were quietly continuing a sentence in answer to the questions in her mind, as if he had nothing to hide from her any longer and what he owed her now was only the act of undressing his soul, as simply as he would have undressed his body: “... this is how I’ve watched you for ten years... from here, from under the ground under your feet... knowing every move you made in your office at the top of the building, but never seeing you, never enough... ten years of nights, spent waiting to catch a glimpse of you, here, on the platforms, when you boarded a train...

Whenever the order came down to couple your car, I’d know of it and wait and see you come down the ramp, and wish you didn’t walk so fast... it was so much like you, that walk, I’d know it anywhere... your walk and those legs of yours... it was always your legs that I’d see first, hurrying down the ramp, going past me as I looked up at you from a dark side track below... I think I could have molded a sculpture of your legs, I knew them, not with my eyes, but with the palms of my hands when I watched you go by... when I turned back to my work... when I went home just before sunrise for the three hours of sleep which I didn’t get...”

“I love you,” she said, her voice quiet and almost toneless except for a fragile sound of youth.

He closed his eyes, as if letting the sound travel through the years behind them. “Ten years, Dagny..., except that once there were a few weeks when I had you before me, in plain sight, within reach, not hurrying away, but held still, as on a lighted stage, a private stage for me to watch... and I watched you for hours through many evenings... in the lighted window of an office that was called the John Galt Line... And one night—”

Her breath was a faint gasp. “Was it you, that night?”

“Did you see me?”

“I saw your shadow... on the pavement... pacing back and forth... it looked like a struggle... it looked like—” She stopped; she did not want to say “torture.”

“It was,” he said quietly. “That night, I wanted to walk in, to face you, to speak, to... That was the night I came closest to breaking my oath, when I saw you slumped across your desk, when I saw you broken by the burden you were carrying—”

“John, that night, it was you that I was thinking of... only I didn’t know it...”

“But, you see, I knew it.”

“... it was you, all my life, through everything I did and everything I wanted... ”

“I know it.”

“John, the hardest was not when I left you in the valley... it was—”

“Your radio speech, the day you returned?”

“Yes! Were you listening?”

“Of course. I’m glad you did it. It was a magnificent thing to do. And I—I knew it, anyway.”

“You knew... about Hank Rearden?”

“Before I saw you in the valley.”

“Was it... when you learned about him, had you expected it?”

“No.”

“Was it... ?” she stopped.

“Hard? Yes. But only for the first few days. That next night... Do you want me to tell you what I did the night after I learned it?”

“Yes.”

“I had never seen Hank Rearden, only pictures of him in the newspapers.

I knew that he was in New York, that night, at some conference of big industrialists. I wanted to have just one look at him. I went to wait at the entrance of the hotel where that conference was held. There were bright lights under the marquee of the entrance, but it was dark beyond, on the pavement, so I could see without being seen, there were a few loafers and vagrants hanging around, there was a drizzle of rain and we clung to the walls of the building. One could tell the members of the conference when they began filing out, by their clothes and their manner—ostentatiously prosperous clothes and a manner of overbearing timidity, as if they were guiltily trying to pretend that they were what they appeared to be for that moment. There were chauffeurs driving up their cars, there were a few reporters delaying them for questions and hangers-on trying to catch a word from them. They were worn men, those industrialists, aging, flabby, frantic with the effort to disguise uncertainty. And then I saw him. He wore an expensive trenchcoat and a hat slanting across his eyes. He walked swiftly, with the kind of assurance that has to be earned, as he’d earned it. Some of his fellow industrialists pounced on him with questions, and those tycoons were acting like hangers-on around him. I caught a glimpse of him as he stood with his hand on the door of his car, his head lifted, I saw the brief flare of a smile under the slanting brim, a confident smile, impatient and a little amused. And then, for one instant, I did what I had never done before, what most men wreck their lives on doing—I saw that moment out of context, I saw the world as he made it look, as if it matched him, as if he were its symbol—I saw a world of achievement, of unenslaved energy, of unobstructed drive through purposeful years to the enjoyment of one’s reward—I saw, as I stood in the rain in a crowd of vagrants, what my years would have brought me, if that world had existed, and I felt a desperate longing—he was the image of everything I should have been... and he had everything that should have been mine... But it was only a moment. Then I saw the scene in full context again and in all of its actual meaning—I saw what price he was paying for his brilliant ability, what torture he was enduring in silent bewilderment, struggling to understand what I had understood—I saw that the world he suggested, did not exist and was yet to be made, I saw him again for what he was, the symbol of my battle, the unrewarded hero whom I was to avenge and to release—and then... then I accepted what I had learned about you and him. I saw that it changed nothing, that I should have expected it—that it was right.”

He heard the faint sound of her moan and he chuckled softly.

“Dagny, it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence. Don’t feel sorry for me. It was gone right then.”

She turned her head to look at him in silence, and he smiled, lifting himself on an elbow to look down at her face as she lay helplessly still.

She whispered, “You’ve been a track laborer, here—here!—for twelve years...”

“Yes.”

“Ever since—”

“Ever since I quit the Twentieth Century.”

“The night when you saw me for the first time... you were working here, then?”

“Yes. And the morning when you offered to work for me as my cook, I was only your track laborer on leave of absence. Do you see why I laughed as I did?”

She was looking up at his face; hers was a smile of pain, his—of pure gaiety, “John...”

“Say it. But say it all.”

“You were here... all those years...”

“Yes.”

“... all those years... while the railroad was perishing... while I was searching for men of intelligence... while I was struggling to hold onto any scrap of it I could find...”

“... while you were combing the country for the inventor of my motor, while you were feeding James Taggart and Wesley Mouch, while you were naming your best achievement after the enemy whom you wanted to destroy.”

She closed her eyes.

“I was here all those years,” he said, “within your reach, inside your own realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness, your longing, watching you in a battle you thought you were fighting for me, a battle in which you were supporting my enemies and taking an endless defeat—I was here, hidden by nothing but an error of your sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing but an optical illusion—I was here, waiting for the day when you would see, when you would know that by the code of the world you were supporting, it’s to the darkest bottom of the underground that all the things you valued would have to be consigned and that it’s there that you would have to look. I was here. I was waiting for you. I love you, Dagny. I love you more than my life, I who have taught men how life is to be loved. I’ve taught them also never to expect the unpaid for—and what I did tonight, I did it with full knowledge that I would pay for it and that my life might have to be the price.”

“No!”

He smiled, nodding. “Oh yes. You know that you’ve broken me for once, that I broke the decision I had set for myself—but I did it consciously, knowing what it meant, I did it, not in blind surrender to the moment, but with full sight of the consequences and full willingness to bear them. I could not let this kind of moment pass us by, it was ours, my love, we had earned it. But you’re not ready to quit and join me—you don’t have to tell me, I know—and since I chose to take what I wanted before it was fully mine, I’ll have to pay for it, I have no way of knowing how or when, I know only that if I give in to an enemy, I’ll take the consequences.” He smiled in answer to the look on her face.

“No, Dagny, you’re not my enemy in mind—and that is what brought me to this—but you are in fact, in the course you’re pursuing, though you don’t see it yet, but I do. My actual enemies are of no danger to me.

You are. You’re the only one who can lead them to find me. They would never have the capacity to know what I am, but with your help—they will.”

“No!”

“No, not by your intention. And you’re free to change your course, but so long as you follow it, you’re not free to escape its logic. Don’t frown, the choice was mine and it’s a danger I chose to accept. I am a trader, Dagny, in all things. I wanted you, I had no power to change your decision, I had only the power to consider the price and decide whether I could afford it. I could. My life is mine to spend or to invest—and you, you’re”—as if his gesture were continuing his sentence, he raised her across his arm and kissed her mouth, while her body hung limply in surrender, her hair streaming down, her head falling back, held only by the pressure of his lips—“you’re the one reward I had to have and chose to buy. I wanted you, and if my life is the price, I’ll give it. My life—but not my mind.”

There was a sudden glint of hardness in his eyes, as he sat up and smiled and asked, “Would you want me to join you and go to work?

Would you like me to repair that interlocking signal system of yours within an hour?”

“No!” The cry was immediate—in answer to the flash of a sudden image, the image of the men in the private dining room of the Wayne Falkland.

He laughed. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to see you working as their serf!”

“And yourself?”

“I think that they’re crumbling and that I’ll win. I can stand it just a little longer.”

“True, it’s just a little longer—not till you win, but till you learn.”

“I can’t let it go!” It was a cry of despair.

“Not yet,” he said quietly.

He got up, and she rose obediently, unable to speak.

“I will remain here, on my job,” he said. “But don’t try to see me.

You’ll have to endure what I’ve endured and wanted to spare you—you’ll have to go on, knowing where I am, wanting me as I’ll want you, but never permitting yourself to approach me. Don’t seek me here.

Don’t come to my home. Don’t ever let them see us together. And when you reach the end, when you’re ready to quit, don’t tell them, just chalk a dollar sign on the pedestal of Nat Taggart’s statue—where it belongs—then go home and wait. I’ll come for you in twenty-four hours.”

She inclined her head in silent promise.

But when he turned to go, a sudden shudder ran through her body, like a first jolt of awakening or a last convulsion of life, and it ended in an involuntary cry: “Where are you going?”

“To be a lamppost and stand holding a lantern till dawn—which is the only work your world relegates me to and the only work it’s going to get.”

She seized his arm, to hold him, to follow, to follow him blindly, abandoning everything but the sight of his face. “John!”

He gripped her wrist, twisted her hand and threw it off. “No,” he said.

Then he took her hand and raised it to his lips and the pressure of his mouth was more passionate a statement than any he had chosen to confess. Then he walked away, down the vanishing line of rail, and it seemed to her that both the rail and the figure were abandoning her at the same time.

When she staggered out into the concourse of the Terminal, the first blast of rolling wheels went shuddering through the walls of the building, like the sudden beat of a heart that had stopped. The temple of Nathaniel Taggart was silent and empty, its changeless light beating down on a deserted stretch of marble. Some shabby figures shuffled across it, as if lost in its shining expanse. On the steps of the pedestal, under the statue of the austere, exultant figure, a ragged bum sat slumped in passive resignation, like a wing-plucked bird with no place to go, resting on any chance cornice.

She fell down on the steps of the pedestal, like another derelict, her dust-smeared cape wrapped tightly about her, she sat still, her head on her arm, past crying or reeling or moving.

It seemed to her only that she kept seeing a figure with a raised arm holding a light, and it looked at times like the Statue of Liberty and then it looked like a man with sun-streaked hair, holding a lantern against a midnight sky, a red lantern that stopped the movement of the world.

“Don’t take it to heart, lady, whatever it is,” said the bum, in a tone of exhausted compassion. “Nothing’s to be done about it, anyway...

What’s the use, lady? Who is John Galt?”

CHAPTER VI THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE

On October 20, the steel workers’ union of Rearden Steel demanded a raise in wages.

Hank Rearden learned it from the newspaper; no demand had been presented to him and it had not been considered necessary to inform him. The demand was made to the Unification Board; it was not explained why no other steel company was presented with a similar claim.

He was unable to tell whether the demanders did or did not represent his workers, the Board’s rules on union elections having made it a matter impossible to define. He learned only that the group consisted of those newcomers whom the Board had slipped into his mills in the past few months.

On October 23, the Unification Board rejected the union’s petition, refusing to grant the raise. If any hearings had been held on the matter, Rearden had not known about it. He had not been consulted, informed or notified. He had waited, volunteering no questions.

On October 25, the newspapers of the country, controlled by the same men who controlled the Board, began a campaign of commiseration with the workers of Rearden Steel. They printed stories about the refusal of the wage raise, omitting any mention of who had refused it or who held the exclusive legal power to refuse, as if counting on the public to forget legal technicalities under a barrage of stories implying that an employer was the natural cause of all miseries suffered by employees. They printed a story describing the hardships of the workers of Rearden Steel under the present rise in the cost of their living—next to a story describing Hank Rearden’s profits, of five years ago. They printed a story on the plight of a Rearden worker’s wife trudging from store to store in a hopeless quest for food—next to a story about a champagne bottle broken over somebody’s head at a drunken party given by an unnamed steel tycoon at a fashionable hotel; the steel tycoon had been Orren Boyle, but the story mentioned no names.

“Inequalities still exist among us,” the newspapers were saying, “and cheat us of the benefits of our enlightened age.”

“Privations have worn the nerves and temper of the people. The situation is reaching the danger point. We fear an outbreak of violence.”

“We fear an outbreak of violence,” the newspapers kept repeating.

On October 28, a group of the new workers at Rearden Steel attacked a foreman and knocked the tuyeres off a blast furnace. Two days later, a similar group broke the ground-floor windows of the administration building. A new worker smashed the gears of a crane, upsetting a ladle of molten metal within a yard of five bystanders. “Guess I went nuts, worrying about my hungry kids,” he said, when arrested. “This is no time to theorize about who’s right or wrong,” the newspapers commented. “Our sole concern is the fact that an inflammatory situation is endangering the steel output of the country.”

Rearden watched, asking no questions. He waited, as if some final knowledge were in the process of unraveling before him, a process not to be hastened or stopped. No—he thought through the early dusk of autumn evenings, looking out the window of his office—no, he was not indifferent to his mills; but the feeling which had once been passion for a living entity was now like the wistful tenderness one feels for the memory of the loved and dead. The special quality of what one feels for the dead, he thought, is that no action is possible any longer.

On the morning of October 31, he received a notice informing him that all of his property, including his bank accounts and safety deposit boxes, had been attached to satisfy a delinquent judgment obtained against him in a trial involving a deficiency in his personal income tax of three years ago. It was a formal notice, complying with every requirement of the law—except that no such deficiency had ever existed and no such trial had ever taken place.

“No,” he said to his indignation-choked attorney, “don’t question them, don’t answer, don’t object.” “But this is fantastic!” “Any more fantastic than the rest?” “Hank, do you want me to do nothing? To take it lying down?” “No, standing up. And I mean, standing. Don’t move. Don’t act.” “But they’ve left you helpless.” “Have they?” he asked softly, smiling.

He had a few hundred dollars in cash, left in his wallet, nothing else.

But the odd, glowing warmth in his mind, like the feel of a distant handshake, was the thought that in a secret safe of his bedroom there lay a bar of solid gold, given to him by a gold-haired pirate.

Next day, on November 1, he received a telephone call from Washington, from a bureaucrat whose voice seemed to come sliding down the wire on its knees in protestations of apology. “A mistake, Mr. Rearden! It was nothing but an unfortunate mistake! That attachment was not intended for you. You know how it is nowadays, with the inefficiency of all office help and with the amount of red tape we’re tangled in, some bungling fool mixed the records and processed the attachment order against you—when it wasn’t your case at all, it was, in fact, the case of a soap manufacturer! Please accept our apologies, Mr. Rearden, our deepest personal apologies at the top level.” The voice slid to a slight, expectant pause. “Mr. Rearden... ?” “I’m listening.” “I can’t tell you how sorry we are to have caused you any embarrassment or inconvenience. And with all those damn formalities that we have to go through—you know how it is, red tape!—it will take a few days, perhaps a week, to de-process that order and to lift the attachment.

... Mr. Rearden?” “I heard you.” “We’re desperately sorry and ready to make any amends within our power. You will, of course, be entitled to claim damages for any inconvenience this might cause you, and we are prepared to pay. We won’t contest it. You will, of course, file such a claim and—” “I have not said that.” “Uh? No, you haven’t... that is... well, what have you said, Mr. Rearden?” “I have said nothing.”

Late on the next afternoon, another voice came pleading from Washington. This one did not seem to slide, but to bounce on the telephone wire with the gay virtuosity of a tight-rope walker. It introduced itself as Tinky Holloway and pleaded that Rearden attend a conference, “an informal little conference, just a few of us, the top-level few,” to be held in New York, at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, day after next.

“There have been so many misunderstandings in the past few weeks!” said Tinky Holloway. “Such unfortunate misunderstandings—and so unnecessary! We could straighten everything out in a jiffy, Mr. Rearden, if we had a chance to have a little talk with you. We’re extremely anxious to see you.”

“You can issue a subpoena for me any time you wish.”

“Oh, no! no! no!” The voice sounded frightened. “No, Mr. Rearden—why think of such things? You don’t understand us, we’re anxious to meet you on a friendly basis, we’re seeking nothing but your voluntary co-operation.” Holloway paused tensely, wondering whether he had heard the faint sound of a distant chuckle; he waited, but heard nothing else.

“Mr. Rearden?”

“Yes?”

“Surely, Mr. Rearden, at a time like this, a conference with us could be to your great advantage.”

“A conference—about what?”

“You’ve encountered so many difficulties—and we’re anxious to help you in any way we can.”

“I have not asked for help.”

“These are precarious times, Mr. Rearden, the public mood is so uncertain and inflammatory, so... so dangerous... and we want to be able to protect you.”

“I have not asked for protection.”

“But surely you realize that we’re in a position to be of value to you and if there’s anything you want from us, any...”

“There isn’t.”

“But you must have problems you’d like to discuss with us.”

“I haven’t.”

“Then... well, then”—giving up the attempt at the play of granting a favor, Holloway switched to an open plea—“then won’t you just give us a hearing?”

“If you have anything to say to me.”

“We have, Mr. Rearden, we certainly have! That’s all we’re asking for—a hearing. Just give us a chance. Just come to this conference.

You wouldn’t be committing yourself to anything—” He said it involuntarily, and stopped, hearing a bright, mocking stab of life in Rearden’s voice, an unpromising-sound, as Rearden answered: “I know it.”

“Well, I mean... that is... well, then, will you come?”

“All right,” said Rearden. “I’ll come.”

He did not listen to Holloway’s assurances of gratitude, he noted only that Holloway kept repeating, “At seven P.M., November fourth, Mr. Rearden... November fourth...” as if the date had some special significance.

Rearden dropped the receiver and lay back in his chair, looking at the glow of furnace flames on the ceiling of his office. He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain.

Tinky Holloway dropped the receiver, in his Washington office, and sat up tensely, frowning. Claude Slagenhop, president of Friends of Global Progress, who had sat in an armchair, nervously chewing a matchstick, glanced up at him and asked, “Not so good?”

Holloway shook his head. “He’ll come, but... no, not so good.”

He added, “I don’t think he’ll take it.”

“That’s what my punk told me.”

“I know.”

“The punk said we’d better not try it.”

“God damn your punk! We’ve got to! We’ll have to risk it!”

The punk was Philip Rearden who, weeks ago, had reported to Claude Slagenhop: “No, he won’t let me in, he won’t give me a job, I’ve tried, as you wanted me to, I’ve tried my best, but it’s no use, he won’t let me set foot inside his mills. And as to his frame of mind—listen, it’s bad. It’s worse than anything I expected. I know him and I can tell you that you won’t have a chance. He’s pretty much at the end of his rope. One more squeeze will snap it. You said the big boys wanted to know. Tell them not to do it. Tell them he... Claude, God help us, if they do it, they’ll lose him!”

“Well, you’re not of much help.”

Slagenhop had said dryly, turning away. Philip had seized his sleeve and asked, his voice shrinking suddenly into open anxiety, “Say, Claude... according to... to Directive 10-289... if he goes, there’s... there’s to be no heirs?”

“That’s right.”

“They’d seize the mills and... and everything?”

“That’s the law.”

“But... Claude, they wouldn’t do that to me, would they?”

“They don’t want him to go. You know that. Hold him, if you can.”

“But I can’t! You know I can’t! Because of my political ideas and... and everything I’ve done for you, you know what he thinks of me! I have no hold on him at all!”

“Well, that’s your tough luck.”

“Claude!” Philip had cried in panic. “Claude, they won’t leave me out in the cold, will they? I belong, don’t I? They’ve always said I belonged, they’ve always said they needed me... they said they needed men like me, not like him, men with my... my sort of spirit, remember? And after all I’ve done for them, after all my faith and service and loyalty to the cause—”

“You damn fool,” Slagenhop had snapped, “of what use are you to us without him?”

On the morning of November 4, Hank Rearden was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. He opened his eyes to the sight of a clear, pale sky, the sky of early dawn, in the window of his bedroom, a sky the delicate color of aquamarine, with the first rays of an invisible sun giving a shade of porcelain pink to Philadelphia’s ancient roof tops.

For a moment, while his consciousness had a purity to equal the sky’s, while he was aware of nothing but himself and had not yet reharnessed his soul to the burden of alien memories, he lay still, held by the sight and by the enchantment of a world to match it, a world where the style of existence would be a continuous morning.

The telephone threw him back into exile: it was screaming at spaced intervals, like a nagging, chronic cry for help, the kind of cry that did not belong in his world. He lifted the receiver, frowning. “Hello?”

“Good morning, Henry,” said a quavering voice; it was his mother.

“Mother—at this hour?” he asked dryly.

“Oh, you’re always up at dawn, and I wanted to catch you before you went to the office.”

“Yes? What is it?”

“I’ve got to see you, Henry. I’ve got to speak to you. Today. Sometime today. It’s important.”

“Has anything happened?”

“No... yes... that is... I’ve got to have a talk with you in person. Will you come?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. I have an appointment in New York tonight. If you want me to come tomorrow—”

“No! No, not tomorrow. It’s got to be today. It’s got to.” There was a dim tone of panic in her voice, but it was the stale panic of chronic helplessness, not the sound of an emergency—except for an odd echo of fear in her mechanical insistence.

“What is it, Mother?”

“I can’t talk about it over the telephone, I’ve got to see you.”

“Then if you wish to come to the office—”

“No! Not at the office! I’ve got to see you alone, where we can talk.

Can’t you come here today, as a favor? It’s your mother who’s asking you a favor. You’ve never come to see us at all. And maybe you’re not the one to blame for it, either. But can’t you do it for me this once, if I beg you to?”

“All right, Mother. I’ll be there at four o’clock this afternoon.”

“That will be fine, Henry. Thank you, Henry. That will be fine.”

It seemed to him that there was a touch of tension in the air of the mills, that day. It was a touch too slight to define—but the mills, to him, were like the face of a loved wife where he could catch shades of feeling almost ahead of expression. He noticed small clusters of the new workers, just three or four of them huddling together in conversation—once or twice too often. He noticed their manner, a manner suggesting a poolroom corner, not a factory. He noticed a few glances thrown at him as he went by, glances a shade too pointed and lingering. He dismissed it; it was not quite enough to wonder about—and he had no time to wonder.

When he drove up to his former home, that afternoon, he stopped his car abruptly at the foot of the hill. He had not seen the house since that May 15, six months ago, when he had walked out of it—and the sight brought back to him the sum of all he had felt in ten years of daily home-coming: the strain, the bewilderment, the gray weight of unconfessed unhappiness, the stern endurance that forbade him to confess it, the desperate innocence of the effort to understand his family... the effort to be just.

He walked slowly up the path toward the door. He felt no emotion, only the sense of a great, solemn clarity. He knew that this house was a monument of guilt—of his guilt toward himself.

He had expected to see his mother and Philip; he had not expected the third person who rose, as they did, at his entrance into the living room: it was Lillian.

He stopped on the threshold. They stood looking at his face and at the open door behind him. Their faces had a look of fear and cunning, the look of that blackmail-through-virtue which he had learned to understand, as if they hoped to get away with it by means of nothing but his pity, to hold him trapped, when a single step back could take him out of their reach.

They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative; his indifference.

“What is she doing here?” he asked, turning to his mother, his voice dispassionately flat.

“Lillian’s been living here ever since your divorce,” she answered defensively. “I couldn’t let her starve on the city pavements, could I?”

The look in his mother’s eyes was half-plea, as if she were begging him not to slap her face, half-triumph, as if she had slapped his. He knew her motive: it was not compassion, there had never been much love between Lillian and her, it was their common revenge against him, it was the secret satisfaction of spending his money on the ex-wife he had refused to support.

Lillian’s head was poised to bow in greeting, with the tentative hint of a smile on her lips, half-timid, half-brash. He did not pretend to ignore her; he looked at her, as if he were seeing her fully, yet as if no presence were being registered in his mind. He said nothing, closed the door and stepped into the room.

His mother gave a small sigh of uneasy relief and dropped hastily into the nearest chair, watching him, nervously uncertain of whether he would follow her example.

“What was it you wanted?” he asked, sitting down.

His mother sat erect and oddly hunched, her shoulders raised, her head half-lowered. “Mercy, Henry,” she whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you understand me?”

“No.”

“Well”—she spread her hands in an untidily fluttering gesture of helplessness—“well...” Her eyes darted about, struggling to escape his attentive glance. “Well, there are so many things to say and... and I don’t know how to say them, but... well, there’s one practical matter, but it’s not important by itself... it’s not why I called you here... ”

“What is it?”

“The practical matter? Our allowance checks—Philip’s and mine. It’s the first of the month, but on account of that attachment order, the checks couldn’t come through. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know it.”

“Well, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.”

His mother sat staring at him, as if counting the seconds of silence.

“Nothing, Henry?”

“I have no power to do anything.”

They were watching his face with a kind of searching intensity; he felt certain that his mother had told him the truth, that immediate financial worry was not their purpose, that it was only the symbol of a much wider issue.

“But, Henry, we’re caught short.”

“So was I.”

“But can’t you send us some cash or something?”

“They gave me no warning, no time to get any cash.”

“Then... Look, Henry, the thing was so unexpected, it scared people, I guess—the grocery store refuses to give us credit, unless you ask for it. I think they want you to sign a credit card or something. So will you speak to them and arrange it?”

“I will not.”

“You won’t?” She choked on a small gasp. “Why?”

“I will not assume obligations that I can’t fulfill.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will not assume debts I have no way of repaying.”

“What do you mean, no way? That attachment is only some sort of technicality, it’s only temporary, everybody knows that!”

“Do they? I don’t.”

“But, Henry—a grocery bill! You’re not sure you’ll be able to pay a grocery bill, you, with all the millions you own?”

“I’m not going to defraud the grocer by pretending that I own those millions.”

“What are you talking about? Who owns them?”

“Nobody.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mother, I think you understand me fully. I think you understood it before I did. There isn’t any ownership left in existence or any property. It’s what you’ve approved of and believed in for years. You wanted me tied. I’m tied. Now it’s too late to play any games about it.”

“Are you going to let some political ideas of yours—” She saw the look on his face and stopped abruptly.

Lillian sat looking down at the floor, as if afraid to glance up at this moment. Philip sat cracking his knuckles.

His mother dragged her eyes into focus again and whispered, “Don’t abandon us, Henry.” Some faint stab of life in her voice told him that the lid of her real purpose was cracking open. “These are terrible times, and we’re scared. That’s the truth of it, Henry, we’re scared, because you’re turning away from us. Oh, I don’t mean just that grocery bill, but that’s a sign—a year ago you wouldn’t have let that happen to us. Now... now you don’t care.” She made an expectant pause.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Well... well, I guess the blame is ours. That’s what I wanted to tell you—that we know we’re to blame. We haven’t treated you right, all these years. We’ve been unfair to you, we’ve made you suffer, we’ve used you and given you no thanks in return. We’re guilty, Henry, we’ve sinned against you, and we confess it. What more can we say to you now? Will you find it in your heart to forgive us?”

“What is it you want me to do?” he asked, in the clear, flat tone of a business conference.

“I don’t know! Who am I to know? But that’s not what I’m talking of right now. Not of doing, only of feeling. It’s your feeling that I’m begging you for, Henry—just your feeling—even if we don’t deserve it. You’re generous and strong. Will you cancel the past, Henry? Will you forgive us?”

The look of terror in her eyes was real. A year ago, he would have told himself that this was her way of making amends; he would have choked his revulsion against her words, words which conveyed nothing to him but the fog of the meaningless; he would have violated his mind to give them meaning, even if he did not understand; he would have ascribed to her the virtue of sincerity in her own terms, even if they were not his. But he was through with granting respect to any terms other than his own.

“Will you forgive us?”

“Mother, it would be best not to speak of that. Don’t press me to tell you why. I think you know it as well as I do. If there’s anything you want done, tell me what it is. There’s nothing else to discuss.

“But I don’t understand you! I don’t! That’s what I called you here for—to ask your forgiveness! Are you going to refuse to answer me?”

“Very well. What would it mean, my forgiveness?”

“Uh?”

“I said, what would it mean?”

. She spread her hands out in an astonished gesture to indicate the self-evident. “Why, it... it would make us feel better.”

“Will it change the past?”

“It would make us feel better to know that you’ve forgiven it.”

“Do you wish me to pretend that the past has not existed?”

“Oh God, Henry, can’t you see? All we want is only to know that you... that you feel some concern for us.”

“I don’t feel it. Do you wish me to fake it?”

“But that’s what I’m begging you for—to feel it!”

“On what ground?”

“Ground?”

“In exchange for what?”

“Henry, Henry, it’s not business we’re talking about, not steel tonnages and bank balances, it’s feelings—and you talk like a trader!”

“I am one.”

What he saw in her eyes was terror—not the helpless terror of struggling and failing to understand, but the terror of being pushed toward the edge where to avoid understanding would no longer be possible.

“Look, Henry,” said Philip hastily, “Mother can’t understand those things. We don’t know how to approach you. We can’t speak your language.”

“I don’t speak yours.”

“What she’s trying to say is that we’re sorry. We’re terribly sorry that we’ve hurt you. You think we’re not paying for it, but we are.

We’re suffering remorse.”

The pain in Philip’s face was real. A year ago, Rearden would have felt pity. Now, he knew that they had held him through nothing but his reluctance to hurt them, his fear of their pain. He was not afraid of it any longer, “We’re sorry, Henry. We know we’ve harmed you. We wish we could atone for it. But what can we do? The past is past. We can’t undo it.”

“Neither can I.”

“You can accept our repentance,” said Lillian, in a voice glassy with caution. “I have nothing to gain from you now. I only want you to know that whatever I’ve done, I’ve done it because I loved you.”

He turned away, without answering.

“Henry!” cried his mother. “What’s happened to you? What’s changed you like that? You don’t seem to be human any more! You keep pressing us for answers, when we haven’t any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic—what’s logic at a time like this?—what’s logic when people are suffering?”

“We can’t help it!” cried Philip.

“We’re at your mercy,” said Lillian.

They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached.

They did not know—and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge—that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of every doubt, was now turned against them—that the same force that had made him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless—that the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

“Henry, don’t you understand us?” his mother was pleading.

“I do,” he said quietly.

She looked away, avoiding the clarity of his eyes. “Don’t you care what becomes of us?”

“I don’t.”

“Aren’t you human?” Her voice grew shrill with anger. “Aren’t you capable of any love at all? It’s your heart I’m trying to reach, not your mind! Love is not something to argue and reason and bargain about!

It’s something to give! To feel! Oh God, Henry, can’t you feel without thinking?”

“I never have.”

In a moment, her voice came back, low and droning: “We’re not as smart as you are, not as strong. If we’ve sinned and blundered, it’s because we’re helpless. We need you, you’re all we’ve got—and we’re losing you—and we’re afraid. These are terrible times, and getting worse, people are scared to death, scared and blind and not knowing what to do. How are we to cope with it, if you leave us? We’re small and weak and we’ll be swept like driftwood in that terror that’s running loose in the world. Maybe we had our share of guilt for it, maybe we helped to bring it about, not knowing any better, but what’s done is done—and we can’t stop it now. If you abandon us, we’re lost. If you give up and vanish, like all those men who—”

It was not a sound that stopped her, it was only a movement of his eyebrows, the brief, swift movement of a check mark. Then they saw him smile; the nature of the smile was the most terrifying of answers.

“So that’s what you’re afraid of,” he said slowly.

“You can’t quit!” his mother screamed in blind panic. “You can’t quit now! You could have, last year, but not now! Not today! You can’t turn deserter, because now they take it out on your family! They’ll leave us penniless, they’ll seize everything, they’ll leave us to starve, they’ll—”

“Keep still!” cried Lillian, more adept than the others at reading danger signs in Rearden’s face.

His face held the remnant of a smile, and they knew that he was not seeing them any longer, but it was not in their power to know why his smile now seemed to hold pain and an almost wistful longing, or why he was looking across the room, at the niche of the farthest window.

He was seeing a finely sculptured face held composed under the lashing of his insults, he was hearing a voice that had said to him quietly, here, in this room: “It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you.” You who had known it then, he thought... but he did not finish the sentence in his mind, he let it end in the bitter twist of his smile, because he knew what he had been about to think: You who had known it then—forgive me.

There it was—he thought, looking at his family—the nature of their pleas for mercy, the logic of those feelings they so righteously proclaimed as non-logical—there was the simple, brutal essence of all men who speak of being able to feel without thought and of placing mercy over justice.

They had known what to fear; they had grasped and named, before he had, the only way of deliverance left open to him; they had understood the hopelessness of his industrial position, the futility of his struggle, the impossible burdens descending to crush him; they had known that in reason, in justice, in self-preservation, his only course was to drop it all and run—yet they wanted to hold him, to keep him in the sacrificial furnace, to make him let them devour the last of him in the name of mercy, forgiveness and brother-cannibal love.

“If you still want me to explain it, Mother,” he said very quietly, “if you’re still hoping that I won’t be cruel enough to name what you’re pretending not to know, then here’s what’s wrong with your idea of forgiveness: You regret that you’ve hurt me and, as your atonement for it, you ask that I offer myself to total immolation.”

“Logic!” she screamed. “There you go again with your damn logic!

It’s pity that we need, pity, not logic!”

He rose to his feet.

“Wait! Don’t go! Henry, don’t abandon us! Don’t sentence us to perish! Whatever we are, we’re human! We want to live!”

“Why, no—” he started in quiet astonishment and ended in quiet horror, as the thought struck him fully, “I don’t think you do. If you did, you would have known how to value me.”

As if in silent proof and answer, Philip’s face went slowly into an expression intended as a smile of amusement, yet holding nothing but fear and malice. “You won’t be able to quit and run away,” said Philip. “You can’t run away without money.”

It seemed to strike its goal; Rearden stopped short, then chuckled, “Thanks, Philip,” he said.

“Uh?” Philip gave a nervous jerk of bewilderment.

“So that’s the purpose of the attachment order. That’s what your friends are afraid of. I knew they were getting set to spring something on me today. I didn’t know that the attachment was their idea of cutting off escape.” He turned incredulously to look at his mother. “And that’s why you had to see me today, before the conference in New York.”

“Mother didn’t know it!” cried Philip, then caught himself and cried louder, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I haven’t said anything! I haven’t said it!” His fear now seemed to have some much less mystic and much more practical quality.

“Don’t worry, you poor little louse, I won’t tell them that you’ve told me anything. And if you were trying—”

He did not finish; he looked at the three faces before him, and a sudden smile ended his sentence, a smile of weariness, of pity, of incredulous revulsion. He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists’ game: the men in Washington had hoped to hold him by prompting these three to try for the role of hostages.

“You think you’re so good, don’t you?” It was a sudden cry and it came from Lillian; she had leaped to her feet to bar his exit; her face was distorted, as he had seen it once before, on that morning when she had learned the name of his mistress. “You’re so good! You’re so proud of yourself! Well, I have something to tell you!”

She looked as if she had not believed until this moment that her game was lost. The sight of her face struck him like a last shred completing a circuit, and in sudden clarity he knew what her game had been and why she had married him.

If to choose a person as the constant center of one’s concern, as the focus of one’s view of life, was to love—he thought—then it was true that she loved him; but if, to him, love was a celebration of one’s self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love. It was for the best of his virtues that Lillian had chosen him, for his strength, his confidence, his pride—she had chosen him as one chooses an object of love, as the symbol of man’s living power, but the destruction of that power had been her goal.

He saw them as they had been at their first meeting: he, the man of violent energy and passionate ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those pretentious ashes who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned out remnants of undigested culture, feeding on the afterglow of the minds of others, offering their denial of the mind as their only claim to distinction, and a craving to control the world as their only lust—she, the woman hanger-on of that elite, wearing their shopworn sneer as her answer to the universe, holding impotence as superiority and emptiness as virtue—he, unaware of their hatred, innocently scornful of their posturing fraud—she, seeing him as the danger to their world, as a threat, as a challenge, as a reproach.

The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if—he thought with a shudder—as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation. Her line of attack, which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear—it was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone’s will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt—as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.

For the same purpose and motive, for the same satisfaction, as others weave complex systems of philosophy to destroy generations, of establish dictatorships to destroy a country, so she, possessing no weapons except femininity, had made it her goal to destroy one man.

Yours was the code of life—he remembered the voice of his lost young teacher—what, then, is theirs?

“I have something to tell you!” cried Lillian, with the sound of that impotent rage which wishes that words were brass knuckles. “You’re so proud of yourself, aren’t you? You’re so proud of your name!

Rearden Steel, Rearden Metal, Rearden Wife! That’s what I was, wasn’t I? Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Henry Rearden!” The sounds she was making were now a string of cackling gasps, an unrecognizable corruption of laughter. “Well, I think you’d like to know that your wife’s been laid by another man! I’ve been unfaithful to you, do you hear me? I’ve been unfaithful, not with some great, noble lover, but with the scummiest louse, with Jim Taggart! Three months ago! Before your divorce!

While I was your wife! While I was still your wife!”

He stood listening like a scientist studying a subject of no personal relevance whatever. There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, nonproperty, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.

“I’ve been unfaithful to you! Don’t you hear me, you stainless Puritan? I’ve slept with Jim Taggart, you incorruptible hero! Don’t you hear me?... Don’t you hear me?... Don’t you... ?”

He was looking at her as he would have looked if a strange woman had approached him on the street with a personal confession—a look like the equivalent of the words: Why tell it to me?

Her voice trailed off. He had not known what the destruction of a person would be like; but he knew that he was seeing the destruction of Lillian. He saw it in the collapse of her face, in the sudden slackening of features, as if there were nothing to hold them together, in the eyes, blind, yet staring, staring inward, filled with that terror which no outer threat can equal. It was not the look of a person losing her mind, but the look of a mind seeing total defeat and, in the same instant, seeing her own nature for the first time—the look of a person seeing that after years of preaching non-existence, she had achieved it.

He turned to go. His mother stopped him at the door, seizing his arm. With a look of stubborn bewilderment, with the last of her effort at self-deceit, she moaned in a voice of tearfully petulant reproach, “Are you really incapable of forgiveness?”

“No, Mother,” he answered, “I’m not. I would have forgiven the past—if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear.”

There was a cold wind outside, tightening his overcoat about him like an embrace, there was the great, fresh sweep of country stretching at the foot of the hill, and the clear, receding sky of twilight. Like two sunsets ending the day, the red glow of the sun was a straight, still band in the west, and the breathing red band in the east was the glow of his mills.

The feel of the steering wheel under his hands and of the smooth highway streaming past, as he sped to New York, had an oddly bracing quality. It was a sense of extreme precision and of relaxation, together, a sense of action without strain, which seemed inexplicably youthful—until he realized that this was the way he had acted and had expected always to act, in his youth—and what he now felt was like the simple, astonished question: Why should one ever have to act in any other manner?

It seemed to him that the skyline of New York, when it rose before him, had a strangely luminous clarity, though its shapes were veiled by distance, a clarity that did not seem to rest in the object, but felt as if the illumination came from him. He looked at the great city, with no tie to any view or usage others had made of it, it was not a city of gangsters or panhandlers or derelicts or whores, it was the greatest industrial achievement in the history of man, its only meaning was that which it meant to him, there was a personal quality in his sight of it, a quality of possessiveness and of unhesitant perception, as if he were seeing it for the first time—or the last.

He paused in the silent corridor of the Wayne-Falkland, at the door of the suite he was to enter; it took him a long moment’s effort to lift his hand and knock; it was the suite that had belonged to Francisco d’Anconia.

There were coils of cigarette smoke weaving through the air of the drawing room, among the velvet drapes and bare, polished tables.

With its costly furniture and the absence of all personal belongings, the room had that air of dreary luxury which pertains to transient occupancy, as dismal as the air of a flophouse. Five figures rose in the fog at his entrance: Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, Dr. Floyd Ferris and a slim, slouching man who looked like a rat-faced tennis player and was introduced to him as Tinky Holloway.

“All right,” said Rearden, cutting off the greetings, the smiles, the offers of drinks and the comments on the national emergency, “what did you want?”

“We’re here as your friends, Mr. Rearden,” said Tinky Holloway, “purely as your friends, for an informal conversation with a view to closer mutual teamwork.”

“We’re anxious to avail ourselves of your outstanding ability,” said Lawson, “and your expert advice on the country’s industrial problems.”

“It’s men like you that we need in Washington,” said Dr. Ferris.

“There’s no reason why you should have remained an outsider for so long, when your voice is needed at the top level of national leadership.”

The sickening thing about it, thought Rearden, was that the speeches were only half-lies; the other half, in their tone of hysterical urgency, was the unstated wish to have it somehow be true. “What did you want?” he asked.

“Why... to listen to you, Mr. Rearden,” said Wesley Mouch, the jerk of his features imitating a frightened smile; the smile was faked, the fear was real. “We... we want the benefit of your opinion on the nation’s industrial crisis.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“But, Mr. Rearden,” said Dr. Ferris, “all we want is a chance to co-operate with you.”

“I’ve told you once, publicly, that I don’t co-operate at the point of a gun.”

“Can’t we bury the hatchet at a time like this?” said Lawson beseechingly.

“The gun? Go ahead.”

“Uh?”

“It’s you who’re holding it. Bury it, if you think you can.”

“That... that was just a figure of speech,” Lawson explained, blinking, “I was speaking metaphorically.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Can’t we all stand together for the sake of the country in this hour of emergency?” said Dr. Ferris. “Can’t we disregard our differences of opinion? We’re willing to meet you halfway. If there’s any aspect of our policy which you oppose, just tell us and we’ll issue a directive to—”

“Cut it, boys. I didn’t come here to help you pretend that I’m not in the position I’m in and that any halfway is possible between us.

Now come to the point. You’ve prepared some new gimmick to spring on the steel industry. What is it?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Mouch, “we do have a vital question to discuss in regard to the steel industry, but... but your language, Mr. Rearden!”

“We don’t want to spring anything on you,” said Holloway. “We asked you here to discuss it with you.”

“I came here to take orders. Give them.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, we don’t want to look at it that way. We don’t want to give you orders. We want your voluntary consent.”

Rearden smiled. “I know it.”

“You do?” Holloway started eagerly, but something about Rearden’s smile made him slide into uncertainty. “Well, then—”

“And you, brother,” said Rearden, “know that that is the flaw in your game, the fatal flaw that will blast it sky-high. Now do you tell me what clout on my head you’re working so hard not to let me notice—or do I go home?”

“Oh no, Mr. Rearden!” cried Lawson, with a sudden dart of his eyes to his wrist watch. “You can’t go now!—That is, I mean, you wouldn’t want to go without hearing what we have to say.”

“Then let me hear it.”

He saw them glancing at one another. Wesley Mouch seemed afraid to address him; Mouch’s face assumed an expression of petulant stubbornness, like a signal of command pushing the others forward; whatever their qualifications to dispose of the fate of the steel industry, they had been brought here to act as Mouch’s conversational bodyguards.

Rearden wondered about the reason for the presence of James Taggart; Taggart sat in gloomy silence, sullenly sipping a drink, never glancing in his direction.

“We have worked out a plan,” said Dr. Ferris too cheerfully, “which will solve the problems of the steel industry and which will meet with your full approval, as a measure providing for the general welfare, while protecting your interests and insuring your safety in a—”

“Don’t try to tell me what I’m going to think. Give me the facts.”

“It is a plan which is fair, sound, equitable and—”

“Don’t tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts.”

“It is a plan which—” Dr. Ferris stopped; he had lost the habit of naming facts.

“Under this plan,” said Wesley Mouch, “we will grant the industry a five per cent increase in the price of steel.” He paused triumphantly.

Rearden said nothing.

“Of course, some minor adjustments will be necessary,” said Holloway airily, leaping into the silence as onto a vacant tennis court. “A certain increase in prices will have to be granted to the producers of iron ore—oh, three per cent at most—in view of the added hardships which some of them, Mr. Larkin of Minnesota, for instance, will now encounter, inasmuch as they’ll have to ship their ore by the costly means of trucks, since Mr. James Taggart has had to sacrifice his Minnesota branch line to the public welfare. And, of course, an increase in freight rates will have to be granted to the country’s railroads—let’s say, seven per cent, roughly speaking—in view of the absolutely essential need for—”

Holloway stopped, like a player emerging from a whirlwind activity to notice suddenly that no opponent was answering his shots.

“But there will be no increase in wages,” said Dr. Ferris hastily. “An essential point of the plan is that we will grant no increase in wages to the steel workers, in spite of their insistent demands. We do wish to be fair to you, Mr. Rearden, and to protect your interests—even at the risk of popular resentment and indignation.”

“Of course, if we expect labor to make a sacrifice,” said Lawson, “we must show them that management, too, is making certain sacrifices for the sake of the country. The mood of labor in the steel industry is extremely tense at present, Mr. Rearden, it is dangerously explosive and... and in order to protect you from... from...” He stopped.

“Yes?” said Rearden. “From?”

“From possible... violence, certain measures are necessary, which... Look, Jim”—he turned suddenly to James Taggart—“why don’t you explain it to Mr. Rearden, as a fellow industrialist?”

“Well, somebody’s got to support the railroads,” said Taggart sullenly, not looking at him. “The country needs railroads and somebody’s got to help us carry the load, and if we don’t get an increase in freight rates—”

“No, no, no!” snapped Wesley Mouch. “Tell Mr. Rearden about the working of the Railroad Unification Plan.”

“Well, the Plan is a full success,” said Taggart lethargically, “except for the not fully controllable element of time. It is only a question of time before our unified teamwork puts every railroad in the country back on its feet. The Plan, I’m in a position to assure you, would work as successfully for any other industry.”

“No doubt about that,” said Rearden, and turned to Mouch. “Why do you ask the stooge to waste my time? What has the Railroad Unification Plan to do with me?”

“But, Mr. Rearden,” cried Mouch with desperate cheerfulness, “that’s the pattern we’re to follow! That’s what we called you here to discuss!”

“What?”

“The Steel Unification Plan!”

There was an instant of silence, as of breaths drawn after a plunge.

Rearden sat looking at them with a glance that seemed to be a glance of interest.

“In view of the critical plight of the steel industry,” said Mouch with a sudden rush, as if not to give himself time to know what made him uneasy about the nature of Rearden’s glance, “and since steel is the most vitally, crucially basic commodity, the foundation of our entire industrial structure, drastic measures must be taken to preserve the country’s steel-making facilities, equipment and plant.” The tone and impetus of public speaking carried him that far and no farther. “With this objective in view, our Plan is... our Plan is...”

“Our Plan is really very simple,” said Tinky Holloway, striving to prove it by the gaily bouncing simplicity of his voice. “We’ll lift all restrictions from the production of steel and every company will produce all it can, according to its ability. But to avoid the waste and danger of dog-eat-dog competition, all the companies will deposit their gross earnings into a common pool, to be known as the Steel Unification Pool, in charge of a special Board. At the end of the year, the Board will distribute these earnings by totaling the nation’s steel output and dividing it by the number of open-hearth furnaces in existence, thus arriving at an average which will be fair to all—and every company will be paid according to its need. The preservation of its furnaces being its basic need, every company will be paid according to the number of furnaces it owns.”

He stopped, waited, then added, “That’s it, Mr. Rearden,” and getting no answer, said, “Oh, there’s a lot of wrinkles to be ironed out, but... but that’s it.”

Whatever reaction they had expected, it was not the one they saw.

Rearden leaned back in his chair, his eyes attentive, but fixed on space, as if looking at a not too distant distance, then he asked, with an odd note of quietly impersonal amusement, “Will you tell me just one thing, boys: what is it you’re counting on?”

He knew that they understood. He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly evasive look which he had once thought to be the look of a liar cheating a victim, but which he now knew to be worse: the look of a man cheating himself of his own consciousness. They did not answer. They remained silent, as if struggling, not to make him forget his question, but to make themselves forget that they had heard it.

“It’s a sound, practical Plan!” snapped James Taggart unexpectedly, with an angry edge of sudden animation in his voice. “It will work!

It has to work! We want it to work!”

No one answered him.

“Mr. Rearden... ?” said Holloway timidly.

“Well, let me see,” said Rearden. “Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel owns 60 open-hearth furnaces, one-third of them standing idle and the rest producing an average of 300 tons of steel per furnace per day. I own 20 open-hearth furnaces, working at capacity, producing 750 tons of Rearden Metal per furnace per day. So we own 80 ‘pooled’ furnaces with a ‘pooled’ output of 27,000 tons, which makes an average of 337.5 tons per furnace. Each day of the year, I, producing 15,000 tons, will be paid for 6,750 tons. Boyle, producing 12,000 tons, will be paid for 20,250 tons. Never mind the other members of the pool, they won’t change the scale, except to bring the average still lower, most of them doing worse than Boyle, none of them producing as much as I. Now how long do you expect me to last under your Plan?”

There was no answer, then Lawson cried suddenly, blindly, righteously, “In time of national peril, it is your duty to serve, suffer and work for the salvation of the country!”

“I don’t see why pumping my earnings into Orren Boyle’s pocket is going to save the country.”

“You have to make certain sacrifices to the public welfare!”

“I don’t see why Orren Boyle is more ‘the public’ than I am.”

“Oh, it’s not a question of Mr. Boyle at all! It’s much wider than any one person. It’s a matter of preserving the country’s natural resources—such as factories—and saving the whole of the nation’s industrial plant. We cannot permit the ruin of an establishment as vast as Mr. Boyle’s. The country needs it.”

“I think,” said Rearden slowly, “that the country needs me much more than it needs Orren Boyle.”

“But of course!” cried Lawson with startled enthusiasm. “The country needs you, Mr. Rearden! You do realize that, don’t you?”

But Lawson’s avid pleasure at the familiar formula of self-immolation, vanished abruptly at the sound of Rearden’s voice, a cold, trader’s voice answering: “I do.”

“It’s not Boyle alone who’s involved,” said Holloway pleadingly.

“The country’s economy would not be able to stand a major dislocation at the present moment. There are thousands of Boyle’s workers, suppliers and customers. What would happen to them if Associated Steel went bankrupt?”

“What will happen to the thousands of my workers, suppliers and customers when I go bankrupt?”

“You, Mr. Rearden?” said Holloway incredulously. “But you’re the richest, safest and strongest industrialist in the country at this moment!”

“What about the moment after next?”

“Uh?”

“How long do you expect me to be able to produce at a loss?”

“Oh, Mr. Rearden, I have complete faith in you!”

“To hell with your faith! How do you expect me to do it?”

“You’ll manage!”

“How?”

There was no answer.

“We can’t theorize about the future,” cried Wesley Mouch, “when here’s an immediate national collapse to avoid! We’ve got to save the country’s economy! We’ve got to do something!” Rearden’s imperturbible glance of curiosity drove him to heedlessness. “If you don’t like it, do you have a better solution to offer?”

“Sure,” said Rearden easily. “If it’s production that you want, then get out of the way, junk all of your damn regulations, let Orren Boyle go broke, let me buy the plant of Associated Steel—and it will be pouring a thousand tons a day from every one of its sixty furnaces.”

“Oh, but... but we couldn’t!” gasped Mouch. “That would be monopoly!”

Rearden chuckled. “Okay,” he said indifferently, “then let my mills superintendent buy it. He’ll do a better job than Boyle.”

“Oh, but that would be letting the strong have an advantage over the weak! We couldn’t do that!”

“Then don’t talk about saving the country’s economy.”

“All we want is—” He stopped.

“All you want is production without men who’re able to produce, isn’t it?”

“That... that’s theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme. All we want is a temporary adjustment.”

“You’ve been making those temporary adjustments for years. Don’t you see that you’ve run out of time?”

“That’s just theo...” His voice trailed off and stopped.

“Well, now, look here,” said Holloway cautiously, “it’s not as if Mr. Boyle were actually... weak. Mr. Boyle is an extremely able man. It’s just that he’s suffered some unfortunate reverses, quite beyond his control. He had invested large sums in a public-spirited project to assist the undeveloped peoples of South America, and that copper crash of theirs has dealt him a severe financial blow. So it’s only a matter of giving him a chance to recover, a helping hand to bridge the gap, a bit of temporary assistance, nothing more. All we have to do is just equalize the sacrifice—then everybody will recover and prosper.”

“You’ve been equalizing sacrifice for over a hundred”—he stopped—“for thousands of years,” said Rearden slowly. “Don’t you see that you’re at the end of the road?”

“That’s just theory!” snapped Wesley Mouch.

Rearden smiled. “I know your practice,” he said softly. “It’s your theory that I’m trying to understand.”

He knew that the specific reason behind the Plan was Orren Boyle; he knew that the working of an intricate mechanism, operated by pull, threat, pressure, blackmail—a mechanism like an irrational adding machine run amuck and throwing up any chance sum at the whim of any moment—had happened to add up to Boyle’s pressure upon these men to extort for him this last piece of plunder. He knew also that Boyle was not the cause of it or the essential to consider, that Boyle was only a chance rider, not the builder, of the infernal machine that had destroyed the world, that it was not Boyle who had made it possible, nor any of the men in this room. They, too, were only riders on a machine without a driver, they were trembling hitchhikers who knew that their vehicle was about to crash into its final abyss—and it was not love or fear of Boyle that made them cling to their course and press on toward their end, it was something else, it was some one nameless element which they knew and evaded knowing, something which was neither thought nor hope, something he identified only as a certain look in their faces, a furtive look saying: I can get away with it. Why?—he thought. Why do they think they can?

“We can’t afford any theories!” cried Wesley Mouch. “We’ve got to act!”

“Well, then, I’ll offer you another solution. Why don’t you take over my mills and be done with it?”

The jolt that shook them was genuine terror.

“Oh no!” gasped Mouch.

“We wouldn’t think of it!” cried Holloway.

“We stand for free enterprise!” cried Dr. Ferris.

“We don’t want to harm you!” cried Lawson. “We’re your friends, Mr. Rearden. Can’t we all work together? We’re your friends.”

There, across the room, stood a table with a telephone, the same table, most likely, and the same instrument—and suddenly Rearden felt as if he were seeing the convulsed figure of a man bent over that telephone, a man who had then known what he, Rearden, was now beginning to learn, a man fighting to refuse him the same request which he was now refusing to the present tenants of this room—he saw the finish of that fight, a man’s tortured face lifted to confront him and a desperate voice saying steadily: “Mr. Rearden, I swear to you... by the woman I love... that I am your friend.”

This was the act he had then called treason, and this was the man he had rejected in order to go on serving the men confronting him now.

Who, then, had been the traitor?—he thought; he thought it almost without feeling, without right to feel, conscious of nothing but a solemnly reverent clarity. Who had chosen to give its present tenants the means to acquire this room? Whom had he sacrificed and to whose profit?

“Mr. Rearden!” moaned Lawson. “What’s the matter?”

He turned his head, saw Lawson’s eyes watching him fearfully and guessed what look Lawson had caught in his face.

“We don’t want to seize your mills!” cried Mouch.

“We don’t want to deprive you of your property!” cried Dr. Ferris.

“You don’t understand us!”

“I’m beginning to.”

A year ago, he thought, they would have shot him; two years ago, they would have confiscated his property; generations ago, men of their kind had been able to afford the luxury of murder and expropriation, the safety of pretending to themselves and their victims that material loot was their only objective. But their time was running out and his fellow victims had gone, gone sooner than any historical schedule had promised, and they, the looters, were now left to face the undisguised reality of their own goal.

“Look, boys,” he said wearily. “I know what you want. You want to eat my mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you think it’s possible?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Mouch in an injured tone of voice. “We said we didn’t want your mills.”

“All right, I’ll say it more precisely: You want to eat me and have me, too. How do you propose to do it?”

“I don’t know how you can say that, after we’ve given you every assurance that we consider you of invaluable importance to the country, to the steel industry, to—”

“I believe you. That’s what makes the riddle harder. You consider me of invaluable importance to the country? Hell, you consider me of invaluable importance even to your own necks. You sit there trembling, because you know that I’m the last one left to save your lives—and you know that time is as short as that. Yet you propose a plan to destroy me, a plan which demands, with an idiot’s crudeness, without loopholes, detours or escape, that I work at a loss—that I work, with every ton I pour costing me more than I’ll get for it—that I feed the last of my wealth away until we all starve together. That much irrationality is not possible to any man or any looter. For your own sake—never mind the country’s or mine—you must be counting on something. What?”

He saw the getting-away-with-it look on their faces, a peculiar look that seemed secretive, yet resentful, as if, incredibly, it were he who was hiding some secret from them.

“I don’t see why you should choose to take such a defeatist view of the situation,” said Mouch sullenly.

“Defeatist? Do you really expect me to be able to remain in business under your Plan?”

“But it’s only temporary!”

“There’s no such thing as a temporary suicide.”

“But it’s only for the duration of the emergency! Only until the country recovers!”

“How do you expect it to recover?”

There was no answer.

“How do you expect me to produce after I go bankrupt?”

“You won’t go bankrupt. You’ll always produce,” said Dr. Ferris indifferently, neither in praise nor in blame, merely in the tone of stating a fact of nature, as he would have said to another man: You’ll always be a bum. “You can’t help it. It’s in your blood. Or, to be more scientific: you’re conditioned that way.”

Rearden sat up: it was as if he had been struggling to find the secret combination of a lock and felt, at those words, a faint click within, as of the first tumbrel falling into place.

“It’s only a matter of weathering this crisis,” said Mouch, “of giving people a reprieve, a chance to catch up.”

“And then?”

“Then things will improve.”

“How?”

There was no answer.

“What will improve them?”

There was no answer.

“Who will improve them?”

“Christ, Mr. Rearden, people don’t just stand still!” cried Holloway, “They do things, they grow, they move forward!”

“What people?”

Holloway waved his hand vaguely. “People,” he said.

“What people? The people to whom you’re going to feed the last of Rearden Steel, without getting anything in return? The people who’ll go on consuming more than they produce?”

“Conditions will change.”

“Who’ll change them?”

There was no answer.

“Have you anything left to loot? If you didn’t see the nature of your policy before—it’s not possible that you don’t see it now. Look around you. All those damned People’s States all over the earth have been existing only on the handouts which you squeezed for them out of this country. But you—you have no place left to sponge on or mooch from. No country on the face of the globe. This was the greatest and last. You’ve drained it. You’ve milked it dry. Of all that irretrievable splendor, I’m only one remnant, the last. What will you do, you and your People’s Globe, after you’ve finished me? What are you hoping for? What do you see ahead—except plain, stark, animal starvation?”

They did not answer. They did not look at him. Their faces wore expressions of stubborn resentment, as if his were the plea of a liar.

Then Lawson said softly, half in reproach, half in scorn, “Well, after all, you businessmen have kept predicting disasters for years, you’ve cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us that we’ll perish—but we haven’t.” He started a smile, but drew back from the sudden intensity of Rearden’s eyes.

Rearden had felt another click in his mind, the sharper click of the second tumbrel connecting the circuits of the lock. He leaned forward.

“What are you counting on?” he asked; his tone had changed, it was low, it had the steady, pressing, droning sound of a drill.

“It’s only a matter of gaining time!” cried Mouch.

“There isn’t any time left to gain.”

“All we need is a chance!” cried Lawson.

“There are no chances left.”

“It’s only until we recover!” cried Holloway.

“There is no way to recover.”

“Only until our policies begin to work!” cried Dr. Ferris.

“There’s no way to make the irrational work.” There was no answer.

“What can save you now?”

“Oh, you’ll do something!” cried James Taggart.

Then—even though it was only a sentence he had heard all his life—he felt a deafening crash within him, as of a steel door dropping open at the touch of the final tumbrel, the one small number completing the sum and releasing the intricate lock, the answer uniting all the pieces, the questions and the unsolved wounds of his life.

In the moment of silence after the crash, it seemed to him that he heard Francisco’s voice, asking him quietly in the ballroom of this building, yet asking it also here and now: “Who is the guiltiest man in this room?” He heard his own answer of the past: “I suppose—James Taggart?” and Francisco’s voice saying without reproach: “No, Mr. Rearden, it’s not James Taggart,”—but here, in this room and this moment, his mind answered: “I am.”

He had cursed these looters for their stubborn blindness? It was he who had made it possible. From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it. If he had accepted the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, if he had accepted Directive 10-289, if he had accepted the law that those who could not equal his ability had the right to dispose of it, that those who had not earned were to profit, but he who had was to lose, that those who could not think were to command, but he who could was to obey them—then were they illogical in believing that they existed in an irrational universe? He had made it for them, he had provided it.

Were they illogical in believing that theirs was only to wish, to wish with no concern for the possible—and that his was to fulfill their wishes, by means they did not have to know or name? They, the impotent mystics, struggling to escape the responsibility of reason, had known that he, the rationalist, had undertaken to serve their whims.

They had known that he had given them a blank check on reality—his was not to ask why?—theirs was not to ask how?—let them demand that he give them a share of his wealth, then all that he owns, then more than he owns—impossible?—no, he’ll do something!

He did not know that he had leaped to his feet, that he stood staring down at James Taggart, seeing in the unbridled shapelessness of Taggart’s features the answer to all the devastation he had witnessed through the years of his life.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Rearden? What have I said?” Taggart was asking with rising anxiety—but he was out of the reach of Taggart’s voice.

He was seeing the progression of the years, the monstrous extortions, the impossible demands, the inexplicable victories of evil, the preposterous plans and unintelligible goals proclaimed in volumes of muddy philosophy, the desperate wonder of the victims who thought that some complex, malevolent wisdom was moving the powers destroying the world—and all of it had rested on one tenet behind the shifty eyes of the victors: he’ll do something!... We’ll get away with it—he’ll let us—he’ll do something!...

You businessmen kept predicting that we’d perish, but we haven’t.

... It was true, he thought. They had not been blind to reality, he had—blind to the reality he himself had created. No, they had not perished, but who had? Who had perished to pay for their manner of survival? Ellis Wyatt... Ken Danagger... Francisco d’Anconia.

He was reaching for his hat and coat, when he noticed that the men in the room were trying to stop him, that their faces had a look of panic and their voices were crying in bewilderment: “What’s the matter, Mr. Rearden?... Why?... But why?... What have we said?...

You’re not going!... You can’t go!... It’s too early!... Not yet! Oh, not yet!”

He felt as if he were seeing them from the rear window of a speeding express, as if they stood on the track behind him, waving their arms in futile gestures and screaming indistinguishable sounds, their figures growing smaller in the distance, their voices fading.

One of them tried to stop him as he turned to the door. He pushed him out of his way, not roughly, but with a simple, smooth sweep of his arm, as one brushes aside an obstructing curtain, then walked out.

Silence was his only sensation, as he sat at the wheel of his car, speeding back down the road to Philadelphia. It was the silence of immobility within him, as if, possessing knowledge, he could now afford to rest, with no further activity of soul. He felt nothing, neither anguish nor elation. It was as if, by an effort of years, he had climbed a mountain to gain a distant view and, having reached the top, had fallen to lie still, to rest before he looked, free to spare himself for the first time.

He was aware of the long, empty road streaming, then curving, then streaming straight before him, of the effortless pressure of his hands on the wheel and the screech of the tires on the curves. But he felt as if he were speeding down a skyway suspended and coiling in empty space.

The passers-by at the factories, the bridges, the power plants along his road saw a sight that had once been natural among them: a trim, expensively powerful car driven by a confident man, with the concept of success proclaimed more loudly than by any electric sign, proclaimed by the driver’s garments, by his expert steering, by his purposeful speed.

They watched him go past and vanish into the haze equating earth with night.

He saw his mills rising in the darkness, as a black silhouette against a breathing glow. The glow was the color of burning gold, and “Rearden Steel” stood written across the sky in the cool, white fire of crystal.

He looked at the long silhouette, the curves of blast furnaces standing like triumphal arches, the smokestacks rising like a solemn colonnade along an avenue of honor in an imperial city, the bridges hanging like garlands, the cranes saluting like lances, the smoke waving slowly like flags. The sight broke the stillness within him and he smiled in greeting. It was a smile of happiness, of love, of dedication. He had never loved his mills as he did in that moment, for—seeing them by an act of his own vision, cleared of all but his own code of values, in a luminous reality that held no contradictions—he was seeing the reason of his love: the mills were an achievement of his mind, devoted to his enjoyment of existence, erected in a rational world to deal with rational men. If those men had vanished, if that world was gone, if his mills had ceased to serve his values—then the mills were only a pile of dead scrap, to be left to crumble, the sooner the better—to be left, not as an act of treason, but as an act of loyalty to their actual meaning.

The mills were still a mile ahead when a small spurt of flame caught his sudden attention. Among all the shades of fire in the vast spread of structures, he could tell the abnormal and the out-of-place: this one was too raw a shade of yellow and it was darting from a spot where no fire had reason to be, from a structure by the gate of the main entrance.

In the next instant, he heard the dry crack of a gunshot, then three answering cracks in swift succession, like an angry hand slapping a sudden assailant.

Then the black mass barring the road in the distance took shape, it was not mere darkness and it did not recede as he came closer—it was a mob squirming at the main gate, trying to storm the mills.

He had time to distinguish waving arms, some with clubs, some with crowbars, some with rifles—the yellow flames of burning wood gushing from the window of the gatekeeper’s office—the blue cracks of gunfire darting out of the mob and the answers spitting from the roofs of the structures—he had time to see a human figure twisting backward and falling from the top of a car—then he sent his wheels into a shrieking curve, turning into the darkness of a side road.

He was going at the rate of sixty miles an hour down the ruts of an unpaved soil, toward the eastern gate of the mills—and the gate was in sight when the impact of tires on a gully threw the car off the road, to the edge of a ravine where an ancient slag heap lay at the bottom. With the weight of his chest and elbow on the wheel, pitted against two tons of speeding metal, the curve of his body forced the curve of the car to complete its screaming half-circle, sweeping it back onto the road and into the control of his hands. It had taken one instant, but in the next his foot went down on the brake, tearing the engine to a stop: for in the moment when his headlights had swept the ravine, he had glimpsed an oblong shape, darker than the gray of the weeds on the slope, and it had seemed to him that a brief white blur had been a human hand waving for help.

Throwing off his overcoat, he went hurrying down the side of the ravine, lumps of earth giving way under his feet, he went catching at the dried coils of brush, half-running, half-sliding toward the long black form which he could now distinguish to be a human body. A scum of cotton was swimming against the moon, he could see the white of a hand and the shape of an arm lying stretched in the weeds, but the body lay still, with no sign of motion.

“Mr. Rearden...”

It was a whisper struggling to be a cry, it was the terrible sound of eagerness fighting against a voice that could be nothing but a moan of pain.

He did not know which came first, it felt like a single shock: his thought that the voice was familiar, a ray of moonlight breaking through the cotton, the movement of falling down on his knees by the white oval of a face, and the recognition. It was the Wet Nurse.

He felt the boy’s hand clutching his with the abnormal strength of agony, while he was noticing the tortured lines of the face, the drained lips, the glazing eyes and the thin, dark trickle from a small, black hole in too wrong, too close a spot on the left side of the boy’s chest.

“Mr. Rearden... I wanted to stop them... I wanted to save you...”

“What happened to you, kid?”

“They shot me, so I wouldn’t talk... I wanted to prevent”—his hand fumbled toward the red glare in the sky—“what they’re doing...

I was too late, but I’ve tried to... I’ve tried... And... and I’m still able... to talk... Listen, they—”

“You need help. Let’s get you to a hospital and—”

“No! Wait! I... I don’t think I have much time left to me and... and I’ve got to tell you... Listen, that riot... it’s staged... on orders from Washington... It’s not workers... not your workers... it’s those new boys of theirs and... and a lot of goons hired on the outside... Don’t believe a word they’ll tell you about it... It’s a frame-up... it’s their rotten kind of frame-up...”

There was a desperate intensity in the boy’s face, the intensity of a crusader’s battle, his voice seemed to gain a sound of life from some fuel burning in broken spurts within him—and Rearden knew that the greatest assistance he could now render was to listen.

“They... they’ve got a Steel Unification Plan ready... and they need an excuse for it... because they know that the country won’t take it... and you won’t stand for it... They’re afraid this one’s going to be too much for everybody... it’s just a plan to skin you alive, that’s all... So they want to make it look like you’re starving your workers... and the workers are running amuck and you’re unable to control them... and the government’s got to step in for your own protection and for public safety... That’s going to be their pitch, Mr. Rearden...”

Rearden was noticing the torn flesh of the boy’s hands, the drying mud of blood and dust on his palms and his clothing, gray patches of dust on knees and stomach, scrambled with the needles of burs. In the intermittent fits of moonlight, he could see the trail of flattened weeds and glistening smears going off into the darkness below. He dreaded to think how far the boy had crawled and for how long.

“They didn’t want you to be here tonight, Mr. Rearden... They didn’t want you to see their ‘People’s rebellion’... Afterwards... you know how they screw up the evidence... there won’t be a straight story to get anywhere... and they hope to fool the country... and you... that they’re acting to protect you from violence...

Don’t let them get away with it, Mr. Rearden!... Tell the country... tell the people... tell the newspapers... Tell them that I told you... it’s under oath... I swear it... that makes it legal, doesn’t it?... doesn’t it?... that gives you a chance?”

Rearden pressed the boy’s hand in his. “Thank you, kid.”

“I... I’m sorry I’m late, Mr. Rearden, but... but they didn’t let me in on it till the last minute... till just before it started...

They called me in on a... a strategy conference... there was a man there by the name of Peters... from the Unification Board... he’s a stooge of Tinky Holloway... who’s a stooge of Orren Boyle... What they wanted from me was... they wanted me to sign a lot of passes... to let some of the goons in... so they’d start trouble from the inside and the outside together... to make it look like they really were your workers... I refused to sign the passes.”

“You did? After they’d let you in on their game?”

“But... but, of course, Mr. Rearden... Did you think I’d play that kind of game?”

“No, kid, no, I guess not. Only—”

“What?”

“Only that’s when you stuck your neck out.”

“But I had to!... I couldn’t help them wreck the mills, could I?

... How long was I to keep from sticking my neck out? Till they broke yours?... And what would I do with my neck, if that’s how I had to keep it?... You... you understand it, don’t you, Mr. Rearden?”

“Yes. I do.”

“I refused them... I ran out of the office... I ran to look for the superintendent... to tell him everything... but I couldn’t find him... and then I heard shots at the main gate and I knew it had started... I tried to phone your home... the phone wires were cut... I ran to get my car, I wanted to reach you or a policeman or a newspaper or somebody... but they must have been following me... that’s when they shot me... in the parking lot... from behind... all I remember is falling and... and then, when I opened my eyes, they had dumped me here... on the slag heap... ”

“On the slag heap?” said Rearden slowly, knowing that the heap was a hundred feet below.

The boy nodded, pointing vaguely down into the darkness. “Yeah... down there... And then I... I started crawling... crawling up... I wanted... I wanted to last till I told somebody who’d tell you.” The pain-twisted lines of his face smoothed suddenly into a smile; his voice had the sound of a lifetime’s triumph as he added, “I have.” Then he jerked his head up and asked, in the tone of a child’s astonishment at a sudden discovery, “Mr. Rearden, is this how it feels to... to want something very much... very desperately much... and to make it?”

“Yes, kid, that’s how it feels.” The boy’s head dropped back against Rearden’s arm, the eyes closing, the mouth relaxing, as if to hold a moment’s profound contentment. “But you can’t stop there. You’re not through. You’ve got to hang on till I get you to a doctor and—” He was lifting the boy cautiously, but a convulsion of pain ran through the boy’s face, his mouth twisting to stop a cry—and Rearden had to lower him gently back to the ground.

The boy shook his head with a glance that was almost apology. “I won’t make it, Mr. Rearden... No use fooling myself... I know I’m through.”

Then, as if by some dim recoil against self-pity, he added, reciting a memorized lesson, his voice a desperate attempt at his old, cynical, intellectual tone, “What does it matter, Mr. Rearden?... Man is only a collection of... conditioned chemicals... and a man’s dying doesn’t make... any more difference than an animal’s.”

“You know better than that.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, I guess I do.”

His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden’s face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. “I know... it’s crap, all those things they taught us... all of it, everything they said... about living or... or dying... Dying... it wouldn’t make any difference to chemicals, but—” he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, “—but it does, to me... And... and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too... But they said there are no values... only social customs... No values!” His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. “No... values...”

Then his eyes opened wider, with the sudden calm of full frankness.

“I’d like to live, Mr. Rearden. God, how I’d like to!” His voice was passionately quiet. “Not because I’m dying... but because I’ve just discovered it tonight, what it means, really to be alive... And... it’s funny... do you know when I discovered it?... In the office... when I stuck my neck out... when I told the bastards to go to hell... There’s... there’s so many things I wish I’d known sooner... But... well, it’s no use crying over spilled milk.” He saw Rearden’s involuntary glance at the flattened trail below and added, “Over spilled anything, Mr. Rearden.”

“Listen, kid,” said Rearden sternly, “I want you to do me a favor.”

“Now, Mr. Rearden?”

“Yes. Now.”

“Why, of course, Mr. Rearden... if I can.”

“You’ve done me a big favor tonight, but I want you to do a still bigger one. You’ve done a great job, climbing out of that slag heap.

Now will you try for something still harder? You were willing to die to save my mills. Will you try to live for me?”

“For you, Mr. Rearden?”

“For me. Because I’m asking you to. Because I want you to. Because we still have a great distance to climb together, you and I.”

“Does it... does it make a difference to you, Mr. Rearden?”

“It does. Will you make up your mind that you want to live—just as you did down there on the slag heap? That you want to last and live? Will you fight for it? You wanted to fight my battle. Will you fight this one with me, as our first?”

He felt the clutching of the boy’s hand; it conveyed the violent eagerness of the answer; the voice was only a whisper: “I’ll try, Mr. Rearden.”

“Now help me to get you to a doctor. Just relax, take it easy and let me lift you.”

“Yes, Mr. Rearden.” With the jerk of a sudden effort, the boy pulled himself up to lean on an elbow.

“Take it easy, Tony.”

He saw a sudden flicker in the boy’s face, an attempt at his old, bright, impudent grin. “Not ‘Non-Absolute’ any more?”

“No, not any more. You’re a full absolute now, and you know it.”

“Yes. I know several of them, now. There’s one”—he pointed at the wound in his chest—“that’s an absolute, isn’t it? And”—he went on speaking while Rearden was lifting him from the ground by imperceptible seconds and inches, speaking as if the trembling intensity of his words were serving as an anesthetic against the pain—“and men can’t live... if rotten bastards... like the ones in Washington... get away with things like... like the one they’re doing tonight... if everything becomes a stinking fake... and nothing is real... and nobody is anybody... men can’t live that way... that’s an absolute, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Tony, that’s an absolute.”

Rearden rose to his feet by a long, cautious effort; he saw the tortured spasm of the boy’s features, as he settled him slowly against his chest, like a baby held tight in his arms—but the spasm twisted into another echo of the impudent grin, and the boy asked, “Who’s the Wet Nurse now?”

“I guess I am.”

He took the first steps up the slant of crumbling soil, his body tensed to the task of shock absorber for his fragile burden, to the task of maintaining a steady progression where there was no foothold to find.

The boy’s head dropped on Rearden’s shoulder, hesitantly, almost as if this were a presumption. Rearden bent down and pressed his lips to the dust-streaked forehead.

The boy jerked back, raising his head with a shock of incredulous, indignant astonishment. “Do you know what you did?” he whispered, as if unable to believe that it was meant for him.

“Put your head down,” said Rearden, “and I’ll do it again.”

The boy’s head dropped and Rearden kissed his forehead; it was like a father’s recognition granted to a son’s battle.

The boy lay still, his face hidden, his hands clutching Rearden’s shoulders. Then, with no hint of sound, with only the sudden beat of faint, spaced, rhythmic shudders to show it, Rearden knew that the boy was crying—crying in surrender, in admission of all the things which he could not put into the words he had never found.

Rearden went on moving slowly upward, step by groping step, fighting for firmness of motion against the weeds, the drifts of dust, the chunks of scrap metal, the refuse of a distant age. He went on, toward the line where the red glow of his mills marked the edge of the pit above him, his movement a fierce struggle that had to take the form of a gentle, unhurried flow.

He heard no sobs, but he felt the rhythmic shudders, and, through the cloth of his shirt, in place of tears, he felt the small, warm, liquid spurts flung from the wound by the shudders. He knew that the tight pressure of his arms was the only answer which the boy was now able to hear and understand—and he held the trembling body as if the strength of his arms could transfuse some part of his living power into the arteries beating ever fainter against him.

Then the sobbing stopped and the boy raised his head. His face seemed thinner and paler, but the eyes were lustrous, and he looked up at Rearden, straining for the strength to speak.

“Mr. Rearden... I... I liked you very much.”

“I know it.”

The boy’s features had no power to form a smile, but it was a smile that spoke in his glance, as he looked at Rearden’s face—as he looked at that which he had not known he had been seeking through the brief span of his life, seeking as the image of that which he had not known to be his values.

Then his head fell back, and there was no convulsion in his face, only his mouth relaxing to a shape of serenity—but there was a brief stab of convulsion in his body, like a last cry of protest—and Rearden went on slowly, not altering his pace, even though he knew that no caution was necessary any longer because what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy’s teachers’ idea of man—a collection of chemicals.

He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms. He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill.

The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy’s body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy’s teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug’s gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.

Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy’s mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler’s caution, who had obeyed with a zealot’s fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs—then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!”—“Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!”—“Don’t argue, obey!”—“Don’t try to understand, believe!”—“Don’t rebel, adjust!”—“Don’t stand out, belong!”—“Don’t struggle, compromise!”—“Your heart is more important than your mind!”—“Who are you to know? Your parents know best!”—“Who are you to know? Society knows best!”—“Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!”—“Who are you to object? All values are relative!”—“Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!”

Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival—yet that was what they did to their children.

Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest—and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.

But a different breed of teachers had once existed, he thought, and had reared the men who created this country; he thought that mothers should set out on their knees to look for men like Hugh Akston, to find them and beg them to return.

He went through the gate of the mills, barely noticing the guards who let him enter, who stared at his face and his burden; he did not pause to listen to their words, as they pointed to the fighting in the distance; he went on walking slowly toward the wedge of light which was the open door of the hospital building.

He stepped into a lighted room full of men, bloody bandages and the odor of antiseptics; he deposited his burden on a bench, with no word of explanation to anyone, and walked out, not glancing behind him.

He walked in the direction of the front gate, toward the glare of fire and the bursts of guns. He saw, once in a while, a few figures running through the cracks between structures or darting behind black corners, pursued by groups of guards and workers; he was astonished to notice that his workers were well armed. They seemed to have subdued the hoodlums inside the mills, and only the siege at the front gate remained to be beaten. He saw a lout scurrying across a patch of lamplight, swinging a length of pipe at a wall of glass panes, battering them down with an animal relish, dancing like a gorilla to the sound of crashing glass, until three husky human figures descended upon him, carrying him writhing to the ground.

The siege of the gate appeared to be ebbing, as if the spine of the mob had been broken. He heard the distant screeches of their cries—but the shots from the road were growing rarer, the fire set to the gatekeeper’s office was put out, there were armed men on the ledges and at windows, posted in well-planned defense.

On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend—and Rearden watched him with detached, impersonal pleasure, as if the battle of the mills were not his any longer, but he could still enjoy the sight of the competence and certainty with which men of that distant age had once combatted evil.

The beam of a roving searchlight struck Rearden’s face, and when the light swept past he saw the man on the roof leaning down, as if peering in his direction. The man waved to someone to replace him, then vanished abruptly from his post.

Rearden hurried on through the short stretch of darkness ahead—but then, from the side, from the crack of an alley, he heard a drunken voice yell, “There he is!” and whirled to see two beefy figures advancing upon him. He saw a leering, mindless face with a mouth hung loose in a joyless chuckle, and a club in a rising fist—he heard the sound of running steps approaching from another direction, he attempted to turn his head, then the club crashed down on his skull from behind—and in the moment of splitting darkness, when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.

His first awareness, when he opened his eyes, was a sense of profound serenity. Then he saw that he was lying on a couch in a modern, sternly gracious room—then, he realized that it was his office and that the two men standing beside him were the mills’ doctor and the superintendent. He felt a distant pain in his head, which would have been violent had he cared to notice it, and he felt a strip of tape across his hair, on the side of his head. The sense of serenity was the knowledge that he was free.

The meaning of his bandage and the meaning of his office were not to be accepted or to exist, together—it was not a combination for men to live with—this was not his battle any longer, nor his job, nor his business.

“I think I’ll be all right, Doctor,” he said, raising his head.

“Yes, Mr. Rearden, fortunately.” The doctor was looking at him as if still unable to believe that this had happened to Hank Rearden inside his own mills; the doctor’s voice was tense with angry loyalty and indignation. “Nothing serious, just a scalp wound and a slight concussion.

But you must take it easy and allow yourself to rest.”

“I will,” said Rearden firmly.

“It’s all over,” said the superintendent, waving at the mills beyond the window. “We’ve got the bastards beaten and on the run. You don’t have to worry, Mr. Rearden. It’s all over.”

“It is,” said Rearden. “There must be a lot of work left for you to do, Doctor.”

“Oh yes! I never thought I’d live to see the day when—”

“I know. Go ahead, take care of it. I’ll be all right.”

“Yes, Mr. Rearden.”

“I’ll take care of the place,” said the superintendent, as the doctor hurried out. “Everything’s under control, Mr. Rearden. But it was the dirtiest—”

“I know,” said Rearden. “Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell, and fired at the thugs.”

“Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I’ve ever had. He’s the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning and warned me, this afternoon. Told me to arm our men, as many as we could. We got no help from the police or the state troopers, they dodged all over the place with the fanciest delays and excuses I ever heard of, it was all fixed in advance, the goons weren’t expecting any armed resistance. It was that furnace foreman—Frank Adams is his name—who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum that came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman! I shudder to think how many of our lives he saved tonight.

Those bastards were out for blood, Mr. Rearden.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“He’s waiting somewhere outside. It’s he who brought you here, and he asked permission to speak to you, when possible.”

“Send him in. Then go back out there, take charge, finish the job.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rearden?”

“No, nothing else.”

He lay still, alone in the silence of his office. He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.

He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor—the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.

If it’s true, he thought, that there are avengers who are working for the deliverance of men like me, let them see me now, let them tell me their secret, let them claim me, let them—“Come in!” he said aloud, in answer to the knock on his door.

The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him in the wind, was Francisco d’Anconia.

It seemed to Rearden that his consciousness shot forward ahead of his body, it was his body that refused to move, stunned by shock, while his mind was laughing, telling him that this was the most natural, the most-to-have-been-expected event in the world.

Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them—and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.

“You’ve been torturing yourself for months,” said Francisco, approaching him, “wondering what words you’d use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again—but now you see that it isn’t necessary, that there’s nothing to ask or to forgive.”

“Yes,” said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, “yes, I know it.”

Francisco sat down on the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden’s forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.

“There’s only one thing I want to tell you,” said Rearden. “I want you to hear it from me: you kept your oath, you were my friend.”

“I knew that you knew it. You knew it from the first. You knew it, no matter what you thought of my actions. You slapped me because you could not force yourself to doubt it.”

“That...” whispered Rearden, staring at him, “that was the thing I had no right to tell you... no right to claim as my excuse...”

“Didn’t you suppose I’d understand it?”

“I wanted to find you... I had no right to look for you... And all that time, you were—” He pointed at Francisco’s clothes, then his hand dropped helplessly and he closed his eyes.

“I was your furnace foreman,” said Francisco, grinning. “I didn’t think you’d mind that. You offered me the job yourself.”

“You’ve been here, as my bodyguard, for two months?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been here, ever since—” He stopped.

“That’s right. On the morning of the day when you were reading my farewell message over the roofs of New York, I was reporting here for my first shift as your furnace foreman.”

“Tell me,” said Rearden slowly, “that night, at James Taggart’s wedding, when you said that you were after your greatest conquest... you meant me, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

Francisco drew himself up a little, as if for a solemn task, his face earnest, the smile remaining only in his eyes. “I have a great deal to tell you,” he said, “But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I... I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?”

Rearden smiled. “What word, Francisco?”

Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, “Thank you, Hank.” Then he raised his head. “Now I’ll tell you the things I had come to say, but did not finish, that night when I came here for the first time. I think you’re ready to hear it.”

“I am.”

The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the walls of the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden’s face, as if in salute and farewell.

CHAPTER VII “THIS IS JOHN GALT SPEAKING”

The doorbell was ringing like an alarm, in a long, demanding scream, broken by the impatient stabs of someone’s frantic finger.

Leaping out of bed, Dagny noticed the cold, pale sunlight of late morning and a clock on a distant spire marking the hour of ten. She had worked at the office till four A.M. and had left word not to expect her till noon.

The white face ungroomed by panic, that confronted her when she threw the door open, was James Taggart.

“He’s gone!” he cried.

“Who?”

“Hank Rearden! He’s gone, quit, vanished, disappeared!”

She stood still for a moment, holding the belt of the dressing gown she had been tying; then, as the full knowledge reached her, her hands jerked the belt tight—as if snapping her body in two at the waistline—while she burst out laughing. It was a sound of triumph.

He stared at her in bewilderment. “What’s the matter with you?” he gasped. “Haven’t you understood?”

“Come in, Jim,” she said, turning contemptuously, walking into the living room. “Oh yes, I’ve understood.”

“He’s quit! Gone! Gone like all the others! Left his mills, his bank accounts, his property, everything! Just vanished! Took some clothing and whatever he had in the safe in his apartment—they found a safe left open in his bedroom, open and empty—that’s all! No word, no note, no explanation! They called me from Washington, but it’s all over town! The news, I mean, the story! They can’t keep it quiet!

They’ve tried to, but... Nobody knows how it got out, but it went through the mills like one of those furnace break-outs, the word that he’d gone, and then... before anyone could stop it, a whole bunch of them vanished! The superintendent, the chief metallurgist, the chief engineer, Rearden’s secretary, even the hospital doctor! And God knows how many others! Deserting, the bastards! Deserting us, in spite of all the penalties we’ve set up! He’s quit and the rest are quitting and those mills are just left there, standing still! Do you understand what that means?”

“Do you?” she asked.

He had thrown his story at her, sentence by sentence, as if trying to knock the smile off her face, an odd, unmoving smile of bitterness and triumph; he had failed. “It’s a national catastrophe! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that it’s a fatal blow? It will break the last of the country’s morale and economy! We can’t let him vanish! You’ve got to bring him back!”

Her smile disappeared.

“You can!” he cried. “You’re the only one who can! He’s your lover, isn’t he?... Oh, don’t look like that! It’s no time for squeamishness!

It’s no time for anything except that we’ve got to have him! You must know where he is! You can find him! You must reach him and bring him back!”

The way she now looked at him was worse than her smile—she looked as if she were seeing him naked and would not endure the sight much longer. “I can’t bring him back,” she said, not raising her voice.

“And I wouldn’t, if I could. Now get out of here.”

“But the national catastrophe—”

“Get out.”

She did not notice his exit. She stood alone in the middle of her living room, her head dropping, her shoulders sagging, while she was smiling, a smile of pain, of tenderness, of greeting to Hank Rearden. She wondered dimly why she should feel so glad that he had found liberation, so certain that he was right, and yet refuse herself the same deliverance. Two sentences were beating in her mind; one was the triumphant sweep of: He’s free, he’s out of their reach!—the other was like a prayer of dedication: There’s still a chance to win, but let me be the only victim...

It was strange—she thought, in the days that followed, looking at the men around her—that catastrophe had made them aware of Hank Rearden with an intensity that his achievements had not aroused, as if the paths of their consciousness were open to disaster, but not to value.

Some spoke of him in shrill curses—others whispered, with a look of guilt and terror, as if a nameless retribution were now to descend upon them—some tried, with hysterical evasiveness, to act as if nothing had happened.

The newspapers, like puppets on tangled strings, were shouting with the same belligerence and on the same dates: “It is social treason to ascribe too much importance to Hank Rearden’s desertion and to undermine public morale by the old-fashioned belief that an individual can be of any significance to society.” “It is social treason to spread rumors about the disappearance of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not disappeared, he is in his office, running his mills, as usual, and there has been no trouble at Rearden Steel, except a minor disturbance, a private scuffle among some workers.” “It is social treason to cast an unpatriotic light upon the tragic loss of Hank Rearden. Mr. Rearden has not deserted, he was killed in an automobile accident on his way to work, and his grief-stricken family has insisted on a private funeral.”

It was strange, she thought, to obtain news by means of nothing but denials, as if existence had ceased, facts had vanished and only the frantic negatives uttered by officials and columnists gave any clue to the reality they were denying. “It is not true that the Miller Steel Foundry of New Jersey has gone out of business.” “It is not true that the Jansen Motor Company of Michigan has closed its doors.” “It is a vicious, anti-social lie that manufacturers of steel products are collapsing under the threat of a steel shortage. There is no reason to expect a steel shortage.” “It is a slanderous, unfounded rumor that a Steel Unification Plan had been in the making and that it had been favored by Mr. Orren Boyle. Mr. Boyle’s attorney has issued an emphatic denial and has assured the press that Mr. Boyle is now vehemently opposed to any such plan. Mr. Boyle, at the moment, is suffering from a nervous breakdown.”

But some news could be witnessed in the streets of New York, in the cold, dank twilight of autumn evenings: a crowd gathered in front of a hardware store, where the owner had thrown the doors open, inviting people to help themselves to the last of his meager stock, while he laughed in shrieking sobs and went smashing his plate-glass windows—a crowd gathered at the door of a run-down apartment house, where a police ambulance stood waiting, while the bodies of a man, his wife and their three children were being removed from a gas-filled room; the man had been a small manufacturer of steel castings.

If they see Hank Rearden’s value now—she thought—why didn’t they see it sooner? Why hadn’t they averted their own doom and spared him his years of thankless torture? She found no answer.

In the silence of sleepless nights, she thought that Hank Rearden and she had now changed places: he was in Atlantis and she was locked out by a screen of light—he was, perhaps, calling to her as she had called to his struggling airplane, but no signal could reach her through that screen.

Yet the screen split open for one brief break—for the length of a letter she received a week after he vanished. The envelope bore no return address, only the postmark of some hamlet in Colorado. The letter contained two sentences:

I have met him. I don’t blame you.

H.R.

She sat still for a long time, looking at the letter, as if unable to move or to feel. She felt nothing, she thought, then noticed that her shoulders were trembling in a faint, continuous shudder, then grasped that the tearing violence within her was made of an exultant tribute, of gratitude and of despair—her tribute to the victory that the meeting of these two men implied, the final victory of both—her gratitude that those in Atlantis still regarded her as one of them and had granted her the exception of receiving a message—the despair of the knowledge that her blankness was a struggle not to hear the questions she was now hearing. Had Galt abandoned her? Had he gone to the valley to meet his greatest conquest? Would he come back? Had he given her up? The unendurable was not that these questions had no answer, but that the answer was so simply, so easily within her reach and that she had no right to take a step to reach it.

She had made no attempt to see him. Every morning, for a month, on entering her office, she had been conscious, not of the room around her, but of the tunnels below, under the floors of the building—and she had worked, feeling as if some marginal part of her brain was computing figures, reading reports, making decisions in a rush of lifeless activity, while her living mind was inactive and still, frozen in contemplation, forbidden to move beyond the sentence: He’s down there. The only inquiry she had permitted herself had been a glance at the payroll list of the Terminal workers. She had seen the name: Galt, John. The list had carried it, openly, for over twelve years. She had seen an address next to the name—and, for a month, had struggled to forget it.

It had seemed hard to live through that month—yet now, as she looked at the letter, the thought that Galt had gone was still harder to bear. Even the struggle of resisting his proximity had been a link to him, a price to pay, a victory achieved in his name. Now there was nothing, except a question that was not to be asked. His presence in the tunnels had been her motor through those days—just as his presence in the city had been her motor through the months of that summer—just as his presence somewhere in the world had been her motor through the years before she ever heard his name. Now she felt as if her motor, too, had stopped.

She went on, with the bright, pure glitter of a five-dollar gold piece, which she kept in her pocket, as her last drop of fuel. She went on, protected from the world around her by a last armor: indifference.

The newspapers did not mention the outbreaks of violence that had begun to burst across the country—but she watched them through the reports of train conductors about bullet-riddled cars, dismantled tracks, attacked trains, besieged stations, in Nebraska, in Oregon, in Texas, in Montana—the futile, doomed outbreaks, prompted by nothing but despair, ending in nothing but destruction. Some were the explosions of local gangs; some spread wider. There were districts that rose in blind rebellion, arrested the local officials, expelled the agents of Washington, killed the tax collectors—then, announcing their secession from the country, went on to the final extreme of the very evil that had destroyed them, as if fighting murder with suicide: went on to seize all property within their reach, to declare community bondage of all to all, and to perish within a week, their meager loot consumed, in the bloody hatred of all for all, in the chaos of no rule save that of the gun, to perish under the lethargic thrust of a few worn soldiers sent out from Washington to bring order to the ruins.

The newspapers did not mention it. The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress, of self-sacrifice as the moral imperative, of greed as the enemy, of love as the solution—their threadbare phrases as sickeningly sweet as the odor of ether in a hospital.

Rumors went spreading through the country in whispers of cynical terror—yet people read the newspapers and acted as if they believed what they read, each competing with the others on who would keep most blindly silent, each pretending that he did not know what he knew, each striving to believe that the unnamed was the unreal. It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.

“Listen to Mr. Thompson’s report on the world crisis, November 22!”

It was the first acknowledgment of the unacknowledged. The announcements began to appear a week in advance and went ringing across the country. “Mr. Thompson will give the people a report on the world crisis! Listen to Mr. Thompson on every radio station and television channel at 8 P.M., on November 22!”

First, the front pages of the newspapers and the shouts of the radio voices had explained it: “To counteract the fears and rumors spread by the enemies of the people, Mr. Thompson will address the country on November 22 and will give us a full report on the state of the world in this solemn moment of global crisis. Mr. Thompson will put an end to those sinister forces whose purpose is to keep us in terror and despair. He will bring light into the darkness of the world and will show us the way out of our tragic problems—a stern way, as befits the gravity of this hour, but a way of glory, as granted by the rebirth of light.

Mr. Thompson’s address will be carried by every radio station in this country and in all countries throughout the world, wherever radio waves may still be heard.”

Then the chorus broke loose and went growing day by day. “Listen to Mr. Thompson on November 22!” said daily headlines. “Don’t forget Mr. Thompson on November 22!” cried radio stations at the end of every program. “Mr. Thompson will tell you the truth!” said placards in subways and buses—then posters on the walls of buildings—then billboards on deserted highways.

“Don’t despair! Listen to Mr. Thompson!” said pennants on government cars, “Don’t give up! Listen to Mr. Thompson!” said banners in offices and shops. “Have faith! Listen to Mr. Thompson!” said voices in churches. “Mr. Thompson will give you the answer!” wrote army airplanes across the sky, the letters dissolving in space, and only the last two words remaining by the time the sentence was completed.

Public loud-speakers were built in the squares of New York for the day of the speech, and came to rasping life once an hour, in time with the ringing of distant clocks, to send over the worn rattle of the traffic, over the heads of the shabby crowds, the sonorous, mechanical cry of an alarm-toned voice: “Listen to Mr. Thompson’s report on the world crisis, November 22!”—a cry rolling through the frosted air and vanishing among the foggy roof tops, under the blank page of a calendar that bore no date.

On the afternoon of November 22, James Taggart told Dagny that Mr. Thompson wished to meet her for a conference before the broadcast.

“In Washington?” she asked incredulously, glancing at her watch.

“Well, I must say that you haven’t been reading the newspapers or keeping track of important events. Don’t you know that Mr. Thompson is to broadcast from New York? He has come here to confer with the leaders of industry, as well as of labor, science, the professions, and the best of the country’s leadership in general. He has requested that I bring you to the conference.”

“Where is it to be held?”

“At the broadcasting studio.”

“They don’t expect me to speak on the air in support of their policies, do they?”

“Don’t worry, they wouldn’t let you near a microphone! They just want to hear your opinion, and you can’t refuse, not in a national emergency, not when it’s an invitation from Mr. Thompson in person!” He spoke impatiently, avoiding her eyes.

“When is that conference to be held?”

“At seven-thirty.”

“Not much time to give to a conference about a national emergency, is it?”

“Mr. Thompson is a very busy man. Now please don’t argue, don’t start being difficult, I don’t see what you’re—”

“All right,” she said indifferently, “I’ll come,” and added, prompted by the kind of feeling that would have made her reluctant to venture without a witness into a conference of gangsters, “but I’ll bring Eddie Willers along with me.”

He frowned, considering it for a moment, with a look of annoyance more than anxiety. “Oh, all right, if you wish,” he snapped, shrugging.

She came to the broadcasting studio with James Taggart as a policeman at one side of her and Eddie Willers as a bodyguard at the other.

Taggart’s face was resentful and tense, Eddie’s—resigned, yet wondering and curious. A stage set of pasteboard walls had been erected in a corner of the vast, dim space, representing a stiffly traditional suggestion of a cross between a stately drawing room and a modest study. A semicircle of empty armchairs filled the set, suggesting a grouping from a family album, with microphones dangling like bait at the end of long poles extended for fishing among the chairs.

The best leadership of the country, that stood about in nervous clusters, had the look of a remnant sale in a bankrupt store: she saw Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Chick Morrison, Tinky Holloway, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Dr. Simon Pritchett, Ma Chalmers, Fred Kinnan, and a seedy handful of businessmen among whom the half-scared, half-flattered figure of Mr. Mowen of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company was, incredibly, intended to represent an industrial tycoon.

But the figure that gave her an instant’s shock was Dr. Robert Stadler. She had not known that a face could age so greatly within the brief space of one year: the look of timeless energy, of boyish eagerness, was gone, and nothing remained of the face except the lines of contemptuous bitterness. He stood alone, apart from the others, and she saw the moment when his eyes saw her enter; he looked like a man in a whorehouse who had accepted the nature of his surroundings until suddenly caught there by his wife: it was a look of guilt in the process of becoming hatred. Then she saw Robert Stadler, the scientist, turn away as if he had not seen her—as if his refusal to see could wipe a fact out of existence.

Mr. Thompson was pacing among the groups, snapping at random bystanders, in the restless manner of a man of action who feels contempt for the duty of making speeches. He was clutching a sheaf of typewritten pages, as if it were a bundle of old clothing about to be discarded.

James Taggart caught him in mid-step, to say uncertainly and loudly, “Mr. Thompson, may I present my sister, Miss Dagny Taggart?”

“So nice of you to come, Miss Taggart,” said Mr. Thompson, shaking her hand as if she were another voter from back home whose name he had never heard before; then he marched briskly off.

“Where’s the conference, Jim?” she asked, and glanced at the clock: it was a huge white dial with a black hand slicing the minutes, like a knife moving toward the hour of eight.

“I can’t help it! I don’t run this show!” he snapped.

Eddie Willers glanced at her with a look of bitterly patient astonishment, and stepped closer to her side.

A radio receiver was playing a program of military marches broadcast from another studio, half-drowning the fragments of nervous voices, of hastily aimless steps, of screeching machinery being pulled to focus upon the drawing-room set.

“Stay tuned to hear Mr. Thompson’s report on the world crisis at eight P.M.!” cried the martial voice of an announcer, from the radio receiver—when the hand on the dial reached the hour of 7:45, “Step on it, boys, step on it!” snapped Mr. Thompson, while the radio burst into another march.

It was 7:50 when Chick Morrison, the Morale Conditioner, who seemed to be in charge, cried, “All right, boys and girls, all right, let’s take our places!” waving a bunch of notepaper, like a baton, toward the light-flooded circle of armchairs.

Mr. Thompson thudded down upon the central chair, in the manner of grabbing a vacant seat in a subway.

Chick Morrison’s assistants were herding the crowd toward the circle of light.

“A happy family,” Chick Morrison explained, “the country must see us as a big, united, happy—What’s the matter with that thing?”

The radio music had gone off abruptly, choking on an odd little gasp of static, cut in the middle of a ringing phrase. It was 7:51. He shrugged and went on: “—happy family. Hurry up, boys. Take close-ups of Mr. Thompson, first.”

The hand of the clock went slicing off the minutes, while press photographers clicked their cameras at Mr. Thompson’s sourly impatient face.

“Mr. Thompson will sit between science and industry!” Chick Morrison announced. “Dr. Stadler, please—the chair on Mr. Thompson’s left. Miss Taggart—this way, please—on Mr. Thompson’s right.”

Dr. Stadler obeyed. She did not move.

“It’s not just for the press, it’s for the television audiences,” Chick Morrison explained to her, in the tone of an inducement.

She made a step forward. “I will not take part in this program,” she said evenly, addressing Mr. Thompson.

“You won’t?” he asked blankly, with the kind of look he would have worn if one of the flower vases had suddenly refused to perform its part.

“Dagny, for Christ’s sake!” cried James Taggart in panic.

“What’s the matter with her?” asked Mr. Thompson.

“But, Miss Taggart! Why?” cried Chick Morrison.

“You all know why,” she said to the faces around her. “You should have known better than to try that again.”

“Miss Taggart!” yelled Chick Morrison, as she turned to go. “It’s a national emer—”

Then a man came rushing toward Mr. Thompson, and she stopped, as did everyone else—and the look on the man’s face swept the crowd into an abruptly total silence. He was the station’s chief engineer, and it was odd to see a look of primitive terror struggling against his remnant of civilized control.

“Mr. Thompson,” he said, “we... we might have to delay the broadcast.”

“What?” cried Mr. Thompson.

The hand of the dial stood at 7:58.

“We’re trying to fix it, Mr. Thompson, we’re trying to find out what it is... but we might not be on time and—”

“What are you talking about? What happened?”

“We’re trying to locate the—”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know! But... We... we can’t get on the air, Mr. Thompson.”

There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Thompson asked, his voice unnaturally low, “Are you crazy?”

“I must be. I wish I were. I can’t make it out. The station is dead.”

“Mechanical trouble?” yelled Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet.

“Mechanical trouble, God damn you, at a time like this? If that’s how you run this station—”

The chief engineer shook his head slowly, in the manner of an adult who is reluctant to frighten a child. “It’s not this station, Mr. Thompson,” he said softly. “It’s every station in the country, as far as we’ve been able to check. And there is no mechanical trouble. Neither here nor elsewhere. The equipment is in order, in perfect order, and they all report the same, but... but all radio stations went off the air at seven-fifty-one, and... and nobody can discover why.”

“But—” cried Mr. Thompson, stopped, glanced about him and screamed, “Not tonight! You can’t let it happen tonight! You’ve got to get me on the air!”

“Mr. Thompson,” the man said slowly, “we’ve called the electronic laboratory of the State Science Institute. They... they’ve never seen anything like it. They said it might be a natural phenomenon, some sort of cosmic disturbance of an unprecedented kind, only—”

“Well?”

“Only they don’t think it is. We don’t, either. They said it looks like radio waves, but of a frequency never produced before, never observed anywhere, never discovered by anybody.”

No one answered him. In a moment, he went on, his voice oddly solemn: “It looks like a wall of radio waves jamming the air, and we can’t get through it, we can’t touch it, we can’t break it... What’s more, we can’t locate its source, not by any of our usual methods...

Those waves seem to come from a transmitter that... that makes any known to us look like a child’s toy!”

“But that’s not possible!” The cry came from behind Mr. Thompson and they all whirled in its direction, startled by its note of peculiar terror; it came from Dr. Stadler. “There’s no such thing! There’s nobody on earth to make it!”

The chief engineer spread his hands out. “That’s it, Dr. Stadler,” he said wearily. “It can’t be possible. It shouldn’t be possible. But there it is.”

“Well, do something about it!” cried Mr. Thompson to the crowd at large.

No one answered or moved.

“I won’t permit this!” cried Mr. Thompson. “I won’t permit it! Tonight of all nights! I’ve got to make that speech! Do something! Solve it, whatever it is! I order you to solve it!”

The chief engineer was looking at him blankly.

“I’ll fire the lot of you for this! I’ll fire every electronic engineer in the country! I’ll put the whole profession on trial for sabotage, desertion and treason! Do you hear me? Now do something, God damn you!

Do something!”

The chief engineer was looking at him impassively, as if words were not conveying anything any longer.

“Isn’t there anybody around to obey an order?” cried Mr. Thompson. “Isn’t there a brain left in this country?”

The hand of the clock reached the dot of 8:00.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a voice that came from the radio receiver—a man’s clear, calm, implacable voice, the kind of voice that had not been heard on the airwaves for years—“Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear.”

Three gasps of recognition greeted the voice, but nobody had the power to notice them among the sounds of the crowd, which were beyond the stage of cries. One was a gasp of triumph, another—of terror, the third—of bewilderment. Three persons had recognized the speaker: Dagny, Dr. Stadler, Eddie Willers. Nobody glanced at Eddie Willers; but Dagny and Dr. Stadler glanced at each other. She saw that his face was distorted by as evil a terror as one could ever bear to see; he saw that she knew and that the way she looked at him was as if the speaker had slapped his face.

“For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.”

The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country—of the world, thought the chief engineer—sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.

“You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning.

You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith.

You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I—I am the man who has granted you your wish.

“Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind.

“Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn’t. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren’t.

“While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem—I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality—mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.

“All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

“We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

“There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality—the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.

“We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.

“Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it, too.

“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom—while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard?

“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality—you who have never known any—but to discover it.

“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door—but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason—that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.

“Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’

“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

“A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

“An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that (hat is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

“A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.

“A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

“Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.

“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.

“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

“But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

“Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell—but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

“No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man—by the work and the judgment of your mind.

“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else—and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

“No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.

“No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed your means of survival—your victims.

“If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.

“We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.

“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

“Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

“Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

“The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason—man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?—Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow—right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life—right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power—right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have—and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.

“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest—but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

“That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’

Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’ you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’—he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’

“This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

“To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

“If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shall think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.

“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth, and confidence is the practical form of being true to one’s own consciousness.

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.

“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live—that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values—that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others—that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road—that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up—that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.

“Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your life in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.

“This wish—which you share, yet submerge as an evil—is the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

“Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.

“If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune or a love you don’t deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence—you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread—a man of justice.

“Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men?

None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice.

It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

“Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.

“To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.

“Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no ‘right’ to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

“To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life—and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.

“Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’ the meaning of that ultimatum is: ‘Your mind or your life’—and neither is possible to man without the other.

“If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind.

That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him—by force.

“It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.

“In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.

“You who are worshippers of the zero—you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing—and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness.

You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

“You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power—and secretly add that fear is the more ‘practical’—you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.

“Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for once—there is no place to run—stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.

“Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

“The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

“A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

“Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being.

It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.

“Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin.

His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

“They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

“No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain—and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

“They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

“They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

“Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations—he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

“And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution, and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent—and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent.

“As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.

“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.

“Selfishness—say both—is man’s evil. Man’s good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.

“Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you’re drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself—use it now. The word that has destroyed you is ‘sacrifice.’ Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.

“‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

“If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.

“If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.

“If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice, “A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

“You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man—and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

“If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

“Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

“If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing.

If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.

“Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice—no values, no standards, no judgment—those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral—a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.

“Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it’s only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values.

To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own—else your gift is not a sacrifice.

“Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite—yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another—the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another—the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another—the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash—these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.

“Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake.

Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.

“And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil—surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.

“It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’—end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’

“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth—in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’—the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’ The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’ is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others—all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ‘non-good for me.’

“Your code—which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective—your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.

“As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are ‘non-you.’

“For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself—and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.

“You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world.

You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guiltily cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name.

“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it?

Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?

“The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.

“Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.

“Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the damned, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.

“Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.

“If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.

“If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.

“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—nonexistence—as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw—the zero.

“Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.

“Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker.

“You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?

“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love—the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.

“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value.

The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.

“Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in Its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them—the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love—the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue—and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

“Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

“Such was your goal—and you’ve reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man’s impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?

“The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice—and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply how small an enemy has claimed your life.

“The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason—like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.

“They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it ‘another dimension,’ which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it ‘the future,’ which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm?

They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

“It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature—escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood.

“What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue—of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill—is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their nonmaterial, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: ‘How?’—they answer with righteous scorn that a ‘how’ is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is ‘Somehow.’ On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.

“And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality—is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

“The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums—that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger—that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not—that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.

“Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. ‘Things as they are’ are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become ‘things as perceived by your wishes.’

“There is no honest revolt against reason—and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or how many prayers you recite—that if you sleep with sluts, you’re not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love your wife next morning—that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything, the universe of a child’s nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will—that you are a man—that you are an entity—that you are.

“No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

“Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: ‘It is, therefore I want it.’ They say: ‘I want it, therefore it is.’

“They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness—they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

“Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind.

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

“Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else—that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch—and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn’t, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.

“The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.

The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a nonentity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent—which is the universe of your teachers’ desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.

“The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself and to others that you don’t see—then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is to start by consuming, that all wishers have an equal claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.

“Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause—you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause—you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause—you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause.

“Who pays for the orgy? Who causes the causeless? Who are the victims, condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the mind.

“We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason—were it not for us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value.

“You—who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings into the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators—it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.

“Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter—so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket—by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason—we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed—we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime—while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by—blank-out.

“Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners—by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don’t possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don’t produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air—while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.

“Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter—and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.

“As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think, but to take over human thinking.

“As they proclaim that the only requirement for running a factory is the ability to turn the cranks of the machines, and blank out the question of who created the factory—so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as ‘motion.’ As they proclaim their right to consume the unearned, and blank out the question of who’s to produce it—so they proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that without the law of identity no such concept as ‘change’ is possible. As they rob an industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power over all of existence while denying that existence exists.

“‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge—‘There are no absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute—‘You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.

“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of nonexistence—when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.

“When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.

“An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it—let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs—let the witchdoctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception—let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic—let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours—let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.

“Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man’s mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness—and you will know the purpose of their creed.

“A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move—and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has—and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection—the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate—the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives—that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

“We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.

“To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him.

His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don’t, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening—he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.

“His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.

“If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another’s faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic’s faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit’s foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon—truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people’s arbitrary wishes—a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls—and if it weren’t for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.

“For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason.

Their heirs and product, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.

“If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: ‘By what means do you know that we are not? Are, brother?

Where did you get that old-fashioned term?’

“If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’—and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘condition’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your—blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of—blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of—blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of—blank-out. An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.

“The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.

“They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum sustenance’—his food, his clothes, his shelter—with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it—from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world.

Created—by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’ Supplied—by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being—but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind—and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce—on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand—of whom? Blank-out.

“And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man’s industrial progress—skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains—by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.’

“Did you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body—you who have agreed to have no mind. Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them—that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens—they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.

“Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages—and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.

“From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries—to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn—to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society—all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.

“But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.

“When you listen to a mystic’s harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is—yours.

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of dependence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

“From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness—and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

“When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. ‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator.

A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked.

His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.

“Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others—just as he is a parasite in spirit, who plunders the ideas created by others—so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.

“There is only one state that fulfills the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence—and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it. A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.

“No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’ no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension—in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.

“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.

“You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders—there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.

“You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder—the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.

“You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

“It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the ‘heart’ over the mind.

“It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners—a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure—and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue.

Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice—and you are the last of their victims.

“We, who were the living buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been living on borrowed time—and I am the man who has called in the loan.

“I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.

“Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an inventor.

I was one of a profession that came last in human history and will be first to vanish on the way back to the sub-human. An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

“Like the man who discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered the use of oil, I discovered a source of energy which was available since the birth of the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an object of worship, of terror and of legends about a thundering god. I completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a fortune for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have raised the efficiency of every human installation using power and would have added the gift of higher productivity to every hour you spend at earning your living.

“Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence.

“Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death.

I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’

“I quit that factory. I quit your world. I made it my job to warn your victims and to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method was to refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice.

“If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world—stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover—ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others—ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube—then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let your women take a look at a jungle female with her shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, century by century—then let them ask themselves whether their ‘instinct of tool-making’ will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to destroy those who provided it all, but not ‘by instinct.’

“Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men’s means of production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never discovered the industrial age—and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists.

When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: ‘Try and get it.’

“You proclaim yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, yet propose to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you cannot equal. You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet propose to dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you need us, yet indulge the impertinence of asserting your right to rule us by force—and expect that we, who are not afraid of that physical nature which fills you with terror, will cower at the sight of any lout who has talked you into voting him a chance to command us.

“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.

“This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence—the congenital dependent—is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. ‘It’s only human,’ you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept ‘human’ mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure—as if ‘to feel’ were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not—as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

“In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be nonprofit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as ‘in the public interest’ any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. ‘Public benefit’ is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure the public. ‘Public welfare’ is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no welfare. ‘The public,’ to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human race.

“What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the ‘No’ of your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and failures—guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live, “Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them alive. I am the first man who told them that I did not need them, and until they learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the need and whose the ability—and if human survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.

“I have done by plan and intention what had been done throughout history by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts—the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises—the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found—they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon the quest to know—in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their mind—and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.

“The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died, destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.

The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again.

“But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of the mystics is up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We, the men of reason, will survive.

“I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before. I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. I have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of humanity’s brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of matter, had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory.

“You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who claims supernatural visions—you, who scramble like vultures for plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune maker—you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted—the root of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical needs—who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?

“Unless you learn the answers to these questions—and learn to stand at reverent attention when you face the achievements of man’s mind—you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and will not permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of your lifespan. I have foreshortened the usual course of history and have let you discover the nature of the payment you had hoped to switch to the shoulders of others. It is the last of your own living power that will now be drained to provide the unearned for the worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a malevolent reality defeated you—you were defeated by your own evasions. Do not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal—you will perish as fodder for the haters of man.

“But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one’s life, I am offering the chance to make a choice.

Choose whether you wish to perish for a morality you have never believed or practiced. Pause on the brink of self-destruction and examine your values and your life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take an inventory of your mind.

“Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you’re devoid of those moral ‘instincts’ which others profess to feel.

The less you felt, the louder you proclaimed your selfless love and servitude to others, in dread of ever letting them discover your own self, the self that you betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a skeleton in the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes and your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread of ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same unspoken secret. Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake, none having the courage to break the vicious circle.

“No matter what dishonorable compromise you’ve made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil—and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain—then your choice is to be moral or to live.

“The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man’s existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works.

And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical ‘good’ was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical ‘evil’ was production, you believe that robbery is practical.

“Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

“Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures—and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal’s race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

“If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation—of yourself, of life, of virtue—in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

“Do you wonder why you live without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?

“Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception—your mind—then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.

“The fence you have been straddling for two hours—while hearing my words and seeking to escape them—is the coward’s formula contained in the sentence: ‘But we don’t have to go to extremes!’ The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road.

By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment. A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you’re being stoned.

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute.

Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.

But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

“You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you’re certain of nothing.

When they shout that it’s immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion—you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich—you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.

“You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.

“At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational—that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence—that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People’s States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it’s evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity—you declare that the looters’ ideals are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one’s wealth away.

Then you wonder why your children join the People’s thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters’ conquests keep creeping closer to your doors—and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.

“You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters’ fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa—that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.

“You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of ‘faith’ in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code—that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you’re half-obeying, half-evading—that they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace—that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist—that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject.

“You blank it out, because your self-esteem is tied to that mystic ‘unselfishness’ which you’ve never possessed or practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher than self-esteem, but you’ve invested it in counterfeit securities—and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you’re unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it’s the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.

“By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.

“Every act of man’s life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.

“Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it—if he’s chosen an irrational standard—he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

“It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them—it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think.

Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don’t come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your ‘selfishness,’ weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.

“The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential ‘you’ which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your ‘feeling.’ Then you drag yourself through a self-made night, in a desperate quest for a nameless fire, moved by some fading vision of a dawn you had seen and lost.

“Observe the persistence, in mankind’s mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us.

The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense—not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing—that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek—which is yours for the taking.

“Some of you will never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have known a single moment of love for existence and of pride in being its worthy lover, a moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its sanction, have known the state of being a man, and I—I am only the man who knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who knew what made it possible and who chose consistently to practice and to be what you had practiced and been in that one moment.

“That choice is yours to make. That choice—the dedication to one’s highest potential—is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.

“Whoever you are—you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand—the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: I am, therefore I’ll think.

“Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind.

Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness—a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty—and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal.

Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.

“Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

“Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

“Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they ‘just feel it’—or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: ‘It’s only logic’ which means: ‘It’s only reality.’ The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.

“Accept the fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness—not pain or mindless self-indulgence—is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume—and the anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility—learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness—and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.

“As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property—and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No—if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes—if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim—is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.

“Do not say that my morality is too hard for you to practice and that you fear it as you fear the unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You kept sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the worst. Look around you: what you have done to society, you had done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.

“We—whom you are now calling, but who will not answer any longer—we had lived among you, but you failed to know us, you refused to think and to see what we were. You failed to recognize the motor I invented—and it became, in your world, a pile of dead scrap. You failed to recognize the hero in your soul—and you failed to know me when I passed you in the street. When you cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which you felt had deserted your world, you gave it my name, but what you were calling was your own betrayed self-esteem. You will not recover one without the other.

“When you failed to give recognition to man’s mind and attempted to rule human beings by force—those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don’t submit. Thus the man of productive genius assumed in your world the disguise of a playboy and became a destroyer of wealth, choosing to annihilate his fortune rather than surrender it to guns. Thus the thinker, the man of reason, assumed in your world the role of a pirate, to defend his values by force against your force, rather than submit to the rule of brutality. Do you hear me, Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold, my first friends, my fellow fighters, my fellow outcasts, in whose name and honor I speak?

“It was the three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the three of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned soul. This greatest of countries was built on my morality—on the inviolate supremacy of man’s right to exist—but you dreaded to admit it and live up to it. You stared at an achievement unequaled in history, you looted its effects and blanked out its cause. In the presence of that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge—you kept damning this country as immoral and its progress as ‘material greed,’ you kept offering apologies for this country’s greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, to decaying Europe’s idol of a leprous, mystic bum.

“This country—the product of reason—could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man’s soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. From its start, this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn’t. You let them infect you with the worship of need—and this country became a giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul, while its living soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in silence, unnamed, unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the industrialist. Do you hear me now, Hank Rearden, the greatest of the victims I have avenged?

“Neither he nor the rest of us will return until the road is clear to rebuild this country—until the wreckage of the morality of sacrifice has been wiped out of our way. A country’s political system is based on its code of morality. We will rebuild America’s system on the moral premise which had been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man’s life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right.

“You who’ve lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim—the source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

“Rights are a moral concept—and morality is a matter of choice.

Men are free not to choose man’s survival as the standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your societies in history, but you’ve evaded the knowledge of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man can’t succeed by defying reality, so a nation can’t, or a country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims.

“Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights,’ as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of ‘human.’

“The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short range and starve when their prey runs out—just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be ‘practical’ if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.

“Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth. We, the men of the mind, we who are traders not masters or slaves, do not deal in blank checks or grant them. We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective.

“So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable demons—no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only when men discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were they able to rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan their future and, slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed modern industry, with its immense complexity of scientific precision, back into the power of unknowable demons—the unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats. A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he’s unable to calculate his chances of a harvest. But you expect industrial giants—who plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake ninety-nine-year contracts—to continue to function and produce, not knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to grab a fast profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention.

“Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but the productive effort of your mind—if you lived on a desert island. The less efficient the thinking of your brain, the less your physical labor would bring you—and you could spend your life on a single routine, collecting a precarious harvest or hunting with bow and arrows, unable to think any further. But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

“When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

“The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

“Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor—the man who discovers new knowledge—is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can’t be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don’t seek or expect the unearned.

“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability.

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.

“Such was the service we had given you and were glad and willing to give. What did we ask in return? Nothing but freedom. We required that you leave us free to function—free to think and to work as we choose—free to take our own risks and to bear our own losses—free to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes—free to gamble on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your mind’s ability to see it—free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind.

Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high.

You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, should own our palaces and yachts—you decided that you had a right to your wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that, was: ‘May you be damned!’ Our answer came true. You are.

“You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence—you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production—you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good. You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now.

“Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of ‘pure knowledge’—the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth—who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as ‘non-practical knowledge’ or any sort of ‘disinterested’ action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on this earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness. Do you hear me, Dr. Robert Stadler?

“But it is not to him that I wish to speak. I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: ‘—to the order of others.’ If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who’re making an effort to know. Those who’re making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

“I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world, stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies’ terms or to win at a game where they’re setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their team to recoup what they’ve taken by helping them rob your neighbors.

One cannot hope to maintain one’s life by accepting bribes to condone one’s destruction. Do not struggle for profit, success or security at the price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is not to be paid off; the more you pay them, the more they will demand; the greater the values you seek or achieve, the more vulnerably helpless you become. Theirs is a system of white blackmail devised to bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by means of your love for existence.

“Do not attempt to rise on the looters’ terms or to climb a ladder while they’re holding the ropes. Do not allow their hands to touch the only power that keeps them in power: your living ambition. Go on strike—in the manner I did. Use your mind and skill in private, extend your knowledge, develop your ability, but do not share your achievements with others. Do not try to produce a fortune, with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung of their ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra penny to support the looters’ state. Since you’re captive, act as a captive, do not help them pretend that you’re free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey—but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose.

Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they’re unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.

“If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence. You have no chance to win on the Morality of Death or by the code of faith and force; raise a standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason.

“Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity—act on your rational values, whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind’s rebirth.

“When the looters’ state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one another—when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal—then and on that day we will return.

“We will open the gates of our city to those who deserve to enter, a city of smokestacks, pipe lines, orchards, markets and inviolate homes.

We will act as the rallying center for such hidden outposts as you’ll build. With the sign of the dollar as our symbol—the sign of free trade and free minds—we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor. Those who choose to join us, will join us; those who don’t, will not have the power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind.

“Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.

“In that world, you’ll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard and the judge. Your virtues will be given protection, your vices and weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, none will be provided for your evil. What you’ll receive from men will not be alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice. And when you’ll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.

“Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a struggle; so does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? Do you wish to continue a struggle that consists of clinging to precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, a struggle where the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories you win bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.

“The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might still be hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by their evasions, but by their virtues and their desperate courage. My brothers in spirit, check on your virtues and on the nature of the enemies you’re serving. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love—the endurance that carries their burdens—the generosity that responds to their cries of despair—the innocence that is unable to conceive of their evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without understanding and incapable of understanding such motives as theirs—the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they love it, too. But the world of today is the world they wanted; life is the object of their hatred. Leave them to the death they worship. In the name of your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don’t exhaust the greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you hear me... my love?

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.

“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

CHAPTER VIII THE EGOIST

“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr. Thompson.

They stood in front of the radio, as the last sound of Galt’s voice had left them. No one had moved through the span of silence; they had stood, looking at the radio, as if waiting. But the radio was now only a wooden box with some knobs and a circle of cloth stretched over an empty loud-speaker.

“We seem to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.

“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.

Mr. Thompson was sitting on a crate. The pale, oblong smear at the level of his elbow was the face of Wesley Mouch, who was seated on the floor. Far behind them, like an island in the vast semi-darkness of the studio space, the drawing room prepared for their broadcast stood deserted and fully lighted, a semicircle of empty armchairs under a cobweb of dead microphones in the glare of the floodlights which no one had taken the initiative to turn off.

Mr. Thompson’s eyes were darting over the faces around him, as if in search of some special vibrations known only to him. The rest of them were trying to do it surreptitiously, each attempting to catch a glimpse of the others without letting them catch his own glance.

“Let me out of here!” screamed a young third-rate assistant, suddenly and to no one in particular.

“Stay put!” snapped Mr. Thompson.

The sound of his own order and the hiccough-moan of the figure immobilized somewhere in the darkness, seemed to help him recapture a familiar version of reality. His head emerged an inch higher from his shoulders.

“Who permitted it to hap—” he began in a rising voice, but stopped; the vibrations he caught were the dangerous panic of the cornered.

“What do you make of it?” he asked, instead. There was no answer.

“Well?” He waited. “Well, say something, somebody!”

“We don’t have to believe it, do we?” cried James Taggart, thrusting his face toward Mr. Thompson, in a manner that was almost a threat.

“Do we?” Taggart’s face was distorted; his features seemed shapeless; a mustache of small beads sparkled between his nose and mouth.

“Pipe down,” said Mr. Thompson uncertainly, drawing a little away from him.

“We don’t have to believe it!” Taggart’s voice had the flat, insistent sound of an effort to maintain a trance. “Nobody’s ever said it before!

It’s just one man! We don’t have to believe it!”

“Take it easy,” said Mr. Thompson.

“Why is he so sure he’s right? Who is he to go against the whole world, against everything ever said for centuries and centuries? Who is he to know? Nobody can be sure! Nobody can know what’s right! There isn’t any right!”

“Shut up!” yelled Mr. Thompson. “What are you trying to—”

The blast that stopped him was a military march leaping suddenly forth from the radio receiver—the military march interrupted three hours ago, played by the familiar screeches of a studio record. It took them a few stunned seconds to grasp it, while the cheerful, thumping chords went goose-stepping through the silence, sounding grotesquely irrelevant, like the mirth of a half-wit. The station’s program director was blindly obeying the absolute that no radio time was ever to be left blank.

“Tell them to cut it off!” screamed Wesley Mouch, leaping to his feet. “It will make the public think that we authorized that speech!”

“You damn fool!” cried Mr. Thompson. “Would you rather have the public think that we didn’t?”

Mouch stopped short and his eyes shot to Mr. Thompson with the appreciative glance of an amateur at a master.

“Broadcasts as usual!” ordered Mr. Thompson. “Tell them to go on with whatever programs they’d scheduled for this hour! No special announcements, no explanations! Tell them to go on as if nothing had happened!”

Half a dozen of Chick Morrison’s morale conditioners went scurrying off toward telephones.

“Muzzle the commentators! Don’t allow them to comment! Send word to every station in the country! Let the public wonder! Don’t let them think that we’re worried! Don’t let them think that it’s important!”

“No!” screamed Eugene Lawson. “No, no, no! We can’t give people the impression that we’re endorsing that speech! It’s horrible, horrible, horrible!” Lawson was not in tears, but his voice had the undignified sound of an adult sobbing with helpless rage.

“Who’s said anything about endorsing it?” snapped Mr. Thompson.

“It’s horrible! It’s immoral! It’s selfish, heartless, ruthless! It’s the most vicious speech ever made! It... it will make people demand to be happy!”

“It’s only a speech,” said Mr. Thompson, not too firmly.

“It seems to me,” said Chick Morrison, his voice tentatively helpful, “that people of nobler spiritual nature, you know what I mean, people of... of... well, of mystical insight”—he paused, as if waiting to be slapped, but no one moved, so he repeated firmly—“yes, of mystical insight, won’t go for that speech. Logic isn’t everything, after all.”

“The workingmen won’t go for it,” said Tinky Holloway, a bit more helpfully. “He didn’t sound like a friend of labor.”

“The women of the country won’t go for it,” declared Ma Chalmers.

“It is, I believe, an established fact that women don’t go for that stuff about the mind. Women have finer feelings. You can count on the women.”

“You can count on the scientists,” said Dr. Simon Pritchett. They were all pressing forward, suddenly eager to speak, as if they had found a subject they could handle with assurance. “Scientists know better than to believe in reason. He’s no friend of the scientists.”

“He’s no friend of anybody,” said Wesley Mouch, recapturing a shade of confidence at the sudden realization, “except maybe of big business.”

“No!” cried Mr. Mowen in terror. “No! Don’t accuse us! Don’t say it! I won’t have you say it!”

“What?”

“That... that... that anybody is a friend of business!”

“Don’t let’s make a fuss about that speech,” said Dr. Floyd Ferris.

“It was too intellectual. Much too intellectual for the common man. It will have no effect. People are too dumb to understand it.”

“Yeah,” said Mouch hopefully, “that’s so.”

“In the first place,” said Dr. Ferris, encouraged, “people can’t think. In the second place, they don’t want to.”

“In the third place,” said Fred Kinnan, “they don’t want to starve.

And what do you propose to do about that?”

It was as if he had pronounced the question which all of the preceding utterances had been intended to stave off. No one answered him, but heads drew faintly deeper into shoulders, and figures drew faintly closer to one another, like a small cluster under the weight of the studio’s empty space. The military march boomed through the silence with the inflexible gaiety of a grinning skull.

“Turn it off!” yelled Mr. Thompson, waving at the radio. “Turn that damn thing off!”

Someone obeyed him. But the sudden silence was worse.

“Well?” said Mr. Thompson at last, raising his eyes reluctantly to Fred Kinnan. “What do you think we ought to do?”

“Who, me?” chuckled Kinnan. “I don’t run this show.”

Mr. Thompson slammed his fist down on his knee. “Say something—” he ordered, but seeing Kinnan turn away, added, “somebody!”

There were no volunteers. “What are we to do?” he yelled, knowing that the man who answered would, thereafter, be the man in power.

“What are we to do? Can’t somebody tell us what to do?”

“I can!” It was a woman’s voice, but it had the quality of the voice they had heard on the radio. They whirled to Dagny before she had time to step forward from the darkness beyond the group. As she stepped forward, her face frightened them—because it was devoid of fear.

“I can,” she said, addressing Mr. Thompson. “You’re to give up.”

“Give up?” he repeated blankly.

“You’re through. Don’t you see that you’re through? What else do you need, after what you’ve heard? Give up and get out of the way.

Leave men free to exist.” He was looking at her, neither objecting nor moving. “You’re still alive, you’re using a human language, you’re asking for answers, you’re counting on reason—you’re still counting on reason, God damn you! You’re able to understand. It isn’t possible that you haven’t understood. There’s nothing you can now pretend to hope, to want or gain or grab or reach. There’s nothing but destruction ahead, the world’s and your own. Give up and get out.”

They were listening intently, but as if they did not hear her words, as if they were clinging blindly to a quality she was alone among them to possess: the quality of being alive. There was a sound of exultant laughter under the angry violence of her voice, her face was lifted, her eyes seemed to be greeting some spectacle at an incalculable distance, so that the glowing patch on her forehead did not look like the reflection of a studio spotlight, but of a sunrise.

“You wish to live, don’t you? Get out of the way, if you want a chance. Let those who can, take over. He knows what to do. You don’t. He is able to create the means of human survival. You aren’t.”

“Don’t listen to her!”

It was so savage a cry of hatred that they drew away from Dr. Robert Stadler, as if he had given voice to the unconfessed within them. His face looked as they feared theirs would look in the privacy of darkness.

“Don’t listen to her!” he cried, his eyes avoiding hers, while hers paused on him for a brief, level glance that began as a shock of astonishment and ended as an obituary. “It’s your life or his!”

“Keep quiet, Professor,” said Mr. Thompson, brushing him off with the jerk of one hand. Mr. Thompson’s eyes were watching Dagny, as if some thought were struggling to take shape inside his skull.

“You know the truth, all of you,” she said, “and so do I, and so does every man who’s heard John Galt! What else are you waiting for?

For proof? He’s given it to you. For facts? They’re all around you. How many corpses do you intend to pile up before you renounce it—your guns, your power, your controls and the whole of your miserable altruistic creed? Give it up, if you want to live. Give it up, if there’s anything left in your mind that’s still able to want human beings to remain alive on this earth!”

“But it’s treason!” cried Eugene Lawson. “She’s talking pure treason!”

“Now, now,” said Mr. Thompson. “You don’t have to go to extremes.”

“Huh?” asked Tinky Holloway.

“But... but surely it’s outrageous?” asked Chick Morrison.

“You’re not agreeing with her, are you?” asked Wesley Mouch.

“Who’s said anything about agreeing?” said Mr. Thompson, his tone surprisingly placid. “Don’t be premature. Just don’t you be premature, any of you. There’s no harm in listening to any argument, is there?”

“That kind of argument?” asked Wesley Mouch, his finger stabbing again and again in Dagny’s direction.

“Any kind,” said Mr. Thompson placidly. “We mustn’t be intolerant.”

“But it’s treason, ruin, disloyalty, selfishness and big-business propaganda!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mr. Thompson. “We’ve got to keep an open mind. We’ve got to give consideration to every one’s viewpoint.

She might have something there. He knows what to do. We’ve got to be flexible.”

“Do you mean that you’re willing to quit?” gasped Mouch.

“Now don’t jump to conclusions,” snapped Mr. Thompson angrily.

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people who jump to conclusions. And another thing is ivory-tower intellectuals who stick to some pet theory and haven’t any sense of practical reality. At a time like this, we’ve got to be flexible above all.”

He saw a look of bewilderment on all the faces around him, on Dagny’s and on the others, though not for the same reasons. He smiled, rose to his feet and turned to Dagny.

“Thank you, Miss Taggart,” he said. “Thank you for speaking your mind. That’s what I want you to know—that you can trust me and speak to me with full frankness. We’re not your enemies, Miss Taggart.

Don’t pay any attention to the boys—they’re upset, but they’ll come down to earth. We’re not your enemies, nor the country’s. Sure, we’ve made mistakes, we’re only human, but we’re trying to do our best for the people—that is, I mean, for everybody—in these difficult times.

We can’t make snap judgments and reach momentous decisions on the spur of the moment, can we? We’ve got to consider it, and mull it over, and weigh it carefully. I just want you to remember that we’re not anybody’s enemies—you realize that, don’t you?”

“I’ve said everything I had to say,” she answered, turning away from him, with no clue to the meaning of his words and no strength to attempt to find it.

She turned to Eddie Willers, who had watched the men around them with a look of so great an indignation that he seemed paralyzed—as if his brain were crying, “It’s evil!” and could not move to any further thought. She jerked her head, indicating the door; he followed her obediently.

Dr. Robert Stadler waited until the door had closed after them, then whirled on Mr. Thompson. “You bloody fool! Do you know what you’re playing with? Don’t you understand that it’s life or death? That it’s you or him?”

The thin tremor that ran along Mr. Thompson’s lips was a smile of contempt. “It’s a funny way for a professor to behave. I didn’t think professors ever went to pieces.”

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you see that it’s one or the other?”

“And what is it that you want me to do?”

“You must kill him.”

It was the fact that Dr. Stadler had not cried it, but had said it in a flat, cold, suddenly and fully conscious voice, that brought a chill moment of silence as the whole room’s answer.

“You must find him,” said Dr. Stadler, his voice cracking and rising once more. “You must leave no stone unturned till you find him and destroy him! If he lives, he’ll destroy all of us! If he lives, we can’t!”

“How am I to find him?” asked Mr. Thompson, speaking slowly and carefully.

“I... I can tell you. I can give you a lead. Watch that Taggart woman. Set your men to watch every move she makes. She’ll lead you to him, sooner or later.”

“How do you know that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it sheer chance that she hasn’t deserted you long ago? Don’t you have the wits to see that she’s one of his kind?”

He did not state what kind.

“Yeah,” said Mr. Thompson thoughtfully, “yeah, that’s true.” He jerked his head up with a smile of satisfaction. “The professor’s got something there. Put a tail on Miss Taggart,” he ordered, snapping his fingers at Mouch. “Have her tailed day and night. We’ve got to find him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mouch blankly.

“And when you find him,” Dr. Stadler asked tensely, “you’ll kill him?”

“Kill him, you damn fool? We need him!” cried Mr. Thompson.

Mouch waited, but no one ventured the question that was on everyone’s mind, so he made the effort to utter stiffly, “I don’t understand you, Mr. Thompson.”

“Oh, you theoretical intellectuals!” said Mr. Thompson with exasperation. “What are you all gaping at? It’s simple. Whoever he is, he’s a man of action. Besides, he’s got a pressure group: he’s cornered all the men of brains. He knows what to do. We’ll find him and he’ll tell us. He’ll tell us what to do. He’ll make things work. He’ll pull us out of the hole.”

“Us, Mr. Thompson?”

“Sure. Never mind your theories. We’ll make a deal with him.”

“With him?”

“Sure. Oh, we’ll have to compromise, we’ll have to make a few concessions to big business, and the welfare boys won’t like it, but what the hell!—do you know any other way out?”

“But his ideas—”

“Who cares about ideas?”

“Mr. Thompson,” said Mouch, choking, “I... I’m afraid he’s a man who’s not open to a deal.”

“There’s no such thing,” said Mr. Thompson.

A cold wind rattled the broken signs over the windows of abandoned shops, in the street outside the radio station. The city seemed abnormally quiet. The distant rumble of the traffic sounded lower than usual and made the wind sound louder. Empty sidewalks stretched off into the darkness; a few lone figures stood in whispering clusters under the rare lights.

Eddie Willers did not speak until they were many blocks away from the station. He stopped abruptly, when they reached a deserted square where the public loud-speakers, which no one had thought of turning off, were now broadcasting a domestic comedy—the shrill voices of a husband and wife quarreling over Junior’s dates—to an empty stretch of pavement enclosed by unlighted house fronts. Beyond the square, a few dots of light, scattered vertically above the twenty fifth-floor limit of the city, suggested a distant, rising form, which was the Taggart Building.

Eddie stopped and pointed at the building, his finger shaking.

“Dagny!” he cried, then lowered his voice involuntarily. “Dagny,” he whispered, “I know him. He... he works there... there...”

He kept pointing at the building with incredulous helplessness. “He works for Taggart Transcontinental...”

“I know,” she answered; her voice was a lifeless monotone.

“As a track laborer... as the lowest of track laborers...”

“I know.”

“I’ve talked to him... I’ve been talking to him for years... in the Terminal cafeteria... He used to ask questions... all sorts of questions about the railroad, and I—God, Dagny! was I protecting the railroad or was I helping to destroy it?”

“Both. Neither. It doesn’t matter now.”

“I could have staked my life that he loved the railroad!”

“He does.”

“But he’s destroyed it.”

“Yes.”

She tightened the collar of her coat and walked on, against a gust of wind.

“I used to talk to him,” he said, after a while. “His face... Dagny, it didn’t look like any of the others, it... it showed that he understood so much... I was glad, whenever I saw him there, in the cafeteria... I just talked... I don’t think I knew that he was asking questions... but he was... so many questions about the railroad and... and about you.”

“Did he ever ask you what I look like, when I’m asleep?”

“Yes... Yes, he did... I’d found you once, asleep in the office, and when I mentioned it, he—” He stopped, as a sudden connection crashed into place in his mind.

She turned to him, in the ray of a street lamp, raising and holding her face in full light for a silent, deliberate moment, as if in answer and confirmation of his thought.

He closed his eyes. “Oh God, Dagny!” he whispered.

They walked on in silence.

“He’s gone by now, isn’t he?” he asked. “From the Taggart Terminal, I mean.”

“Eddie,” she said, her voice suddenly grim, “if you value his life, don’t ever ask that question. You don’t want them to find him, do you?

Don’t give them any leads. Don’t ever breathe a word to anyone about having known him. Don’t try to find out whether he’s still working in the Terminal.”

“You don’t mean that he’s still there?”

“I don’t know. I know only that he might be.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Still?”

“Yes. Keep quiet about it, if you don’t want to destroy him.”

“I think he’s gone. He won’t be back. I haven’t seen him since... since...”

“Since when?” she asked sharply.

“The end of May. The night when you left for Utah, remember?” He paused, as the memory of that night’s encounter and the full understanding of its meaning struck him together. He said with effort, “I saw him that night. Not since... I’ve waited for him, in the cafeteria... He never came back.”

“I don’t think he’ll let you see him now, he’ll keep out of your way. But don’t look for him. Don’t inquire.”

“It’s funny. I don’t even know what name he used. It was Johnny something or—”

“It was John Galt,” she said, with a faint, mirthless chuckle. “Don’t look at the Terminal payroll. The name is still there.”

“Just like that? All these years?”

“For twelve years. Just like that.”

“And it’s still there now?”

“Yes.”

After a moment, he said, “It proves nothing, I know. The personnel office hasn’t taken a single name off the payroll list since Directive 10-289. If a man quits, they give his name and job to a starving friend of their own, rather than report it to the Unification Board.”

“Don’t question the personnel office or anyone. Don’t call attention to his name. If you or I make any inquiries about him, somebody might begin to wonder. Don’t look for him. Don’t make any move in his direction. And if you ever catch sight of him by chance, act as if you didn’t know him.”

He nodded. After a while, he said, his voice tense and low, “I wouldn’t turn him over to them, not even to save the railroad.”

“Eddie—”

“Yes?”

“If you ever catch sight of him, tell me.”

He nodded.

Two blocks later, he asked quietly, “You’re going to quit, one of these days, and vanish, aren’t you?”

“Why do you say that?” It was almost a cry.

“Aren’t you?”

She did not answer at once; when she did, the sound of despair was present in her voice only in the form of too tight a monotone: “Eddie, if I quit, what would happen to the Taggart trains?”

“There would be no Taggart trains within a week. Maybe less.”

“There will be no looters’ government within ten days. Then men like Cuffy Meigs will devour the last of our rails and engines. Should I lose the battle by failing to wait one more moment? How can I let it go—Taggart Transcontinental, Eddie—go forever, when one last effort can still keep it in existence? If I’ve stood things this long, I can stand them a little longer. Just a little longer. I’m not helping the looters.

Nothing can help them now.”

“What are they going to do?”

“I don’t know. What can they do? They’re finished.”

“I suppose so.”

“Didn’t you see them? They’re miserable, panic-stricken rats, running for their lives.”

“Does it mean anything to them?”

“What?”

“Their lives.”

“They’re still struggling, aren’t they? But they’re through and they know it.”

“Have they ever acted on what they know?”

“They’ll have to. They’ll give up. It won’t be long. And we’ll be here to save whatever’s left.”

“Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known,” said official broadcasts on the morning of November 23, “that there is no cause for alarm. He urges the public not to draw any hasty conclusions. We must preserve our discipline, our morale, our unity and our sense of broad-minded tolerance. The unconventional speech, which some of you might have heard on the radio last night, was a thought-provoking contribution to our pool of ideas on world problems. We must consider it soberly, avoiding the extremes of total condemnation or of reckless agreement.

We must regard it as one viewpoint out of many in our democratic forum of public opinion, which, as last night has proved, is open to all. The truth, says Mr. Thompson, has many facets. We must remain impartial.”

“They’re silent,” wrote Chick Morrison, as a summary of its content, across the report from one of the field agents he had sent out on a mission entitled Public Pulse Taking. “They’re silent,” he wrote across the next report, then across another and another. “Silence,” he wrote, with a frown of uneasiness, summing up his report to Mr. Thompson.

“People seem to be silent.”

The flames that went up to the sky of a winter night and devoured a home in Wyoming were not seen by the people of Kansas, who watched a trembling red glow on the prairie horizon, made by the flames that went up to devour a farm, and the glow was not reflected by the windows of a street in Pennsylvania, where the twisting red tongues were reflections of the flames that went up to devour a factory. Nobody mentioned, next morning, that those flames had not been set off by chance and that the owners of the three places had vanished. Neighbors observed it without comment—and without astonishment. A few homes were found abandoned in random corners across the nation, some left locked, shuttered and empty, others open and gutted of all movable goods—but people watched it in silence and, through the snowdrifts of untended streets in the haze of pre-morning darkness, went on trudging to their jobs, a little slower than usual.

Then, on November 27, a speaker at a political meeting in Cleveland was beaten up and had to escape by scurrying down dark alleys.

His silent audience had come to sudden life when he had shouted that the cause of all their troubles was their selfish concern with their own troubles.

On the morning of November 29, the workers of a shoe factory in Massachusetts were astonished, on entering their workshop, to find that the foreman was late. But they went to their usual posts and went on with their habitual routine, pulling levers, pressing buttons, feeding leather into automatic cutters, piling boxes on a moving belt, wondering, as the hours went by, why they did not catch sight of the foreman, or the superintendent, or the general manager, or the company president.

It was noon before they discovered that the front offices of the plant were empty.

“You goddamn cannibals!” screamed a woman in the midst of a crowded movie theater, breaking into sudden, hysterical sobs—and the audience showed no sign of astonishment, as if she were screaming for them all, “There is no cause for alarm,” said official broadcasts on December 5. “Mr. Thompson wishes it to be known that he is willing to negotiate with John Galt for the purpose of devising ways and means to achieve a speedy solution of our problems. Mr. Thompson urges the people to be patient. We must not worry, we must not doubt, we must not lose heart.”

The attendants of a hospital in Illinois showed no astonishment when a man was brought in, beaten up by his elder brother, who had supported him all his life: the younger man had screamed at the elder, accusing him of selfishness and greed—just as the attendants of a hospital in New York City showed no astonishment at the case of a woman who came in with a fractured jaw: she had been slapped in the face by a total stranger, who had heard her ordering her five-year old son to give his best toy to the children of neighbors.

Chick Morrison attempted a whistle-stop tour to buttress the country’s morale by speeches on self-sacrifice for the general welfare. He was stoned at the first of his stops and had to return to Washington.

Nobody had ever granted them the title of “the better men” or, granting it, had paused to grasp that title’s meaning, but everybody knew, each in his own community, neighborhood, office or shop and in his own unidentified terms, who would be the men that would now fail to appear at their posts on some coming morning and would silently vanish in search of unknown frontiers—the men whose faces were tighter than the faces around them, whose eyes were more direct, whose energy was more conscientiously enduring—the men who were now slipping away, one by one, from every corner of the country—of the country which was now like the descendant of what had once been regal glory, prostrated by the scourge of hemophilia, losing the best of its blood from a wound not to be healed.

“But we’re willing to negotiate!” yelled Mr. Thompson to his assistants, ordering the special announcement to be repeated by all radio stations three times a day. “We’re willing to negotiate! He’ll hear it! He’ll answer!”

Special listeners were ordered to keep watch, day and night, at radio receivers tuned to every known frequency of sound, waiting for an answer from an unknown transmitter. There was no answer.

Empty, hopeless, unfocused faces were becoming more apparent in the streets of the cities, but no one could read their meaning. As some men were escaping with their bodies into the underground of uninhabited regions, so others could only save their souls and were escaping into the underground of their minds—and no power on earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasite’s emptiness never to be filled.

“I don’t know what to do,” said the assistant superintendent of an oil refinery, refusing to accept the job of the superintendent who had vanished—and the agents of the Unification Board were unable to tell whether he lied or not. It was only an edge of precision in the tone of his voice, an absence of apology or shame, that made them wonder whether he was a rebel or a fool. It was dangerous to force the job on either.

“Give us men!” The plea began to hammer progressively louder upon the desk of the Unification Board, from all parts of a country ravaged by unemployment, and neither the pleaders nor the Board dared to add the dangerous words which the cry was implying: “Give us men of ability!” There were waiting lines years’ long for the jobs of janitors, greasers, porters and bus boys; there was no one to apply for the jobs of executives, managers, superintendents, engineers.

The explosions of oil refineries, the crashes of defective airplanes, the break-outs of blast furnaces, the wrecks of colliding trains, and the rumors of drunken orgies in the offices of newly created executives, made the members of the Board fear the kind of men who did apply for the positions of responsibility.

“Don’t despair! Don’t give up!” said official broadcasts on December 15, and on every day thereafter, “We will reach an agreement with John Galt. We will get him to lead us. He will solve all our problems.

He will make things work. Don’t give up! We will get John Galt!”

Rewards and honors were offered to applicants for managerial jobs—then to foremen—then to skilled mechanics—then to any man who would make an effort to deserve a promotion in rank: wage raises, bonuses, tax exemptions and a medal devised by Wesley Mouch, to be known as “The Order of Public Benefactors.” It brought no results. Ragged people listened to the offers of material comforts and turned away with lethargic indifference, as if they had lost the concept of “Value.” These, thought the public-pulse-takers with terror, were men who did not care to live—or men who did not care to live on present terms.

“Don’t despair! Don’t give up! John Galt will solve our problems!” said the radio voices of official broadcasts, traveling through the silence of falling snow into the silence of unheated homes.

“Don’t tell them that we haven’t got him!” cried Mr. Thompson to his assistants, “But for God’s sake tell them to find him!” Squads of Chick Morrison’s boys were assigned to the task of manufacturing rumors: half of them went spreading the story that John Galt was in Washington and in conference with government officials—while the other half went spreading the story that the government would give five hundred thousand dollars as reward for information that would help to find John Galt.

“No, not a clue,” said Wesley Mouch to Mr. Thompson, summing up the reports of the special agents who had been sent to check on every man by the name of John Galt throughout the country. “They’re a shabby lot. There’s a John Galt who’s a professor of ornithology, eighty years old—there’s a retired greengrocer with a wife and nine children—there’s an unskilled railroad laborer who’s held the same job for twelve years—and other such trash.”

“Don’t despair! We will get John Galt!” said official broadcasts in the daytime—but at night, every hour on the hour, by a secret, official order, an appeal was sent from short-wave transmitters into the empty reaches of space: “Calling John Galt!... Calling John Galt!...

Are you listening, John Galt?... We wish to negotiate. We wish to confer with you. Give us word on where you can be reached...

Do you hear us, John Galt?” There was no answer.

The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy. In September, a bushel of wheat had cost eleven dollars; it had cost thirty dollars in November; it had cost one hundred in December; it was now approaching the price of two hundred—while the printing presses of the government treasury were running a race with starvation, and losing.

When the workers of a factory beat up their foreman and wrecked the machinery in a fit of despair— no action could be taken against them. Arrests were futile, the jails were full, the arresting officers winked at their prisoners and let them escape on their way to prison—men were going through the motions prescribed for the moment, with no thought of the moment to follow. No action could be taken when mobs of starving people attacked warehouses on the outskirts of cities.

No action could be taken when punitive squadrons joined the people they had been sent to punish.

“Are you listening, John Galt?... We wish to negotiate. We might meet your terms... Are you listening?”

There were whispered rumors of covered wagons traveling by night through abandoned trails, and of secret settlements armed to resist the attacks of those whom they called the “Indians”—the attacks of any looting savages, be they homeless mobs or government agents. Lights were seen, once in a while, on the distant horizon of a prairie, in the hills, on the ledges of mountains, where no buildings had been known to exist. But no soldiers could be persuaded to investigate the sources of those lights.

On the doors of abandoned houses, on the gates of crumbling factories, on the walls of government buildings, there appeared, once in a while, traced in chalk, in paint, in blood, the curving mark which was the sign of the dollar.

“Can you hear us, John Galt?... Send us word. Name your terms.

We will meet any terms you set. Can you hear us?”

There was no answer.

The shaft of red smoke that shot to the sky on the night of January 22 and stood abnormally still for a while, like a solemn memorial obelisk, then wavered and swept back and forth across the sky, like a searchlight sending some undecipherable message, then went out as abruptly as it had come, marked the end of Rearden Steel—but the inhabitants of the area did not know it. They learned it only on subsequent nights, when they—who had cursed the mills for the smoke, the fumes, the soot and the noise—looked out and, instead of the glow pulsating with life on their familiar horizon, they saw a black void.

The mills had been nationalized, as the property of a deserter.

The first bearer of the title of “People’s Manager,” appointed to run the mills, had been a man of the Orren Boyle faction, a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading. But at the end of a month, after too many clashes with the workers, too many occasions when his only answer had been that he couldn’t help it, too many undelivered orders, too many telephonic pressures from his buddies, he had begged to be transferred to some other position. The Orren Boyle faction had been falling apart, since Mr. Boyle had been confined to a rest home, where his doctor had forbidden him any contact with business and had put him to the job of weaving baskets, as a means of occupational therapy. The second “People’s Manager” sent to Rearden Steel had belonged to the faction of Cuffy Meigs. He had worn leather leggings and perfumed hair lotions, he had come to work with a gun on his hip, he had kept snapping that discipline was his primary goal and that by God he’d get it or else. The only discernible rule of the discipline had been his order forbidding all questions.

After weeks of frantic activity on the part of insurance companies, of firemen, of ambulances and of first-aid units, attending to a series of inexplicable accidents—the “People’s Manager” had vanished one morning, having sold and shipped to sundry racketeers of Europe and Latin America most of the cranes, the automatic conveyors, the supplies of refractory brick, the emergency power generator, and the carpet from what had once been Rearden’s office.

No one had been able to untangle the issues in the violent chaos of the next few days—the issues had never been named, the sides had remained unacknowledged, but everyone had known that the bloody encounters between the older workers and the newer had not been driven to such ferocious intensity by the trivial causes that kept setting them off—neither guards nor policemen nor state troopers had been able to keep order for the length of a day—nor could any faction muster a candidate willing to accept the post of “People’s Manager.”

On January 22, the operations of Rearden Steel had been ordered temporarily suspended.

The shaft of red smoke, that night, had been caused by a sixty-year old worker, who had set fire to one of the structures and had been caught in the act, laughing dazedly and staring at the flames. “To avenge Hank Rearden!” he had cried defiantly, tears running down his furnace-tanned face.

Don’t let it hurt you like this—thought Dagny, slumped across her desk, over the page of the newspaper where a single brief paragraph announced the “temporary” end of Rearden Steel—don’t let it hurt you so much... She kept seeing the face of Hank Rearden, as he had stood at the window of his office, watching a crane move against the sky with a load of green-blue rail... Don’t let it hurt him like this—was the plea in her mind, addressed to no one—don’t let him hear of it, don’t let him know... Then she saw another face, a face with unflinching green eyes, saying to her, in a voice made implacable by the quality of respect for facts: “You’ll have to hear about it.

... You’ll hear about every wreck. You’ll hear about every discontinued train... Nobody stays in this valley by faking reality in any manner whatever...” Then she sat still, with no sight and no sound in her mind, with nothing but that enormous presence which was pain—until she heard the familiar cry that had become a drug killing all sensations except the capacity to act: “Miss Taggart, we don’t know what to do!”—and she shot to her feet to answer.

“The People’s State of Guatemala,” said the newspapers on January 26, “declines the request of the United States for the loan of a thousand tons of steel.”

On the night of February 3, a young pilot was flying his usual route, a weekly-flight from Dallas to New York City. When he reached the empty darkness beyond Philadelphia—in the place where the flames of Rearden Steel had for years been his favorite landmark, his greeting in the loneliness of night, the beacon of a living earth—he saw a snow-covered spread, dead-white and phosphorescent in the starlight, a spread of peaks and craters that looked like the surface of the moon.

He quit his job, next morning.

Through the frozen nights, over dying cities, knocking in vain at unanswering windows, beating on unechoing walls, rising above the roofs of lightless buildings and the skeletal girders of ruins, the plea went on crying through space, crying to the stationary motion of the stars, to the heatless fire of their twinkling: “Can you hear us, John Galt? Can you hear us?”

“Miss Taggart, we don’t know what to do,” said Mr. Thompson; he had summoned her to a personal conference on one of his scurrying trips to New York. “We’re ready to give in, to meet his terms, to let him take over—but where is he?”

“For the third time,” she said, her face and voice shut tight against any fissure of emotion, “I do not know where he is. What made you think I did?”

“Well, I didn’t know, I had to try... I thought, just in case...

I thought, maybe if you had a way to reach him—”

“I haven’t.”

“You see, we can’t announce, not even by short-wave radio, that we’re willing to surrender altogether. People might hear it. But if you had some way to reach him, to let him know that we’re ready to give in, to scrap our policies, to do anything he tells us to—”

“I said I haven’t.”

“If he’d only agree to a conference, just a conference, it wouldn’t commit him to anything, would it? We’re willing to turn the whole economy over to him—if he’d only tell us when, where, how. If he’d give us some word or sign... if he’d answer us... Why doesn’t he answer?”

“You’ve heard his speech.”

“But what are we to do? We can’t just quit and leave the country without any government at all. I shudder to think what would happen.

With the kind of social elements now on the loose—why, Miss Taggart, it’s all I can do to keep them in line or we’d have plunder and bloody murder in broad daylight. I don’t know what’s got into people, but they just don’t seem to be civilized any more. We can’t quit at a time like this. We can neither quit nor run things any longer. What are we to do, Miss Taggart?”

“Start decontrolling.”

“Huh?”

“Start lifting taxes and removing controls.”

“Oh, no, no, no! That’s out of the question!”

“Out of whose question?”

“I mean, not at this time, Miss Taggart, not at this time. The country isn’t ready for it. Personally, I’d agree with you, I’m a freedom loving man, Miss Taggart, I’m not after power—but this is an emergency.

People aren’t ready for freedom. We’ve got to keep a strong hand. We can’t adopt an idealistic theory, which—”

“Then don’t ask me what to do,” she said, and rose to her feet.

“But, Miss Taggart—”

“I didn’t come here to argue.”

She was at the door when he sighed and said, “I hope he’s still alive.” She stopped. “I hope they haven’t done anything rash.”

A moment passed before she was able to ask, “Who?” and to make it a word, not a scream.

He shrugged, spreading his arms and letting them drop helplessly.

“I can’t hold my own boys in line any longer. I can’t tell what they might attempt to do. There’s one clique—the Ferris-Lawson-Meigs faction—that’s been after me for over a year to adopt stronger measures. A tougher policy, they mean. Frankly, what they mean is: to resort to terror. Introduce the death penalty for civilian crimes, for critics, dissenters and the like. Their argument is that since people won’t co-operate, won’t act for the public interest voluntarily, we’ve got to force them to. Nothing will make our system work, they say, but terror.

And they may be right, from the look of things nowadays. But Wesley won’t go for strong-arm methods; Wesley is a peaceful man, a liberal, and so am I. We’re trying to keep the Ferris boys in check, but...

You see, they’re set against any surrender to John Galt. They don’t want us to deal with him. They don’t want us to find him. I wouldn’t put anything past them. If they found him first, they’d—there’s no telling what they might do... That’s what worries me. Why doesn’t he answer? Why hasn’t he answered us at all? What if they’ve found him and killed him? I wouldn’t know... So I hoped that perhaps you had some way... some means of knowing that he’s still alive...” His voice trailed off into a question mark.

The whole of her resistance against a rush of liquefying terror went into the effort to keep her voice as stiff as her knees, long enough to say, “I do not know,” and her knees stiff enough to carry her out of the room.

From behind the rotted posts of what had once been a corner vegetable stand, Dagny glanced furtively back at the street: the rare lamp posts broke the street into separate islands, she could see a pawnshop in the first patch of light, a saloon in the next, a church in the farthest, and black gaps between them; the sidewalks were deserted; it was hard to tell, but the street seemed empty.

She turned the corner, with deliberately resonant steps, then stopped abruptly to listen: it was hard to tell whether the abnormal tightness inside her chest was the sound of her own heartbeats, and hard to distinguish it from the sound of distant wheels and from the glassy rustle which was the East River somewhere close by; but she heard no sound of human steps behind her. She jerked her shoulders, it was part-shrug, part-shudder, and she walked faster. A rusty clock in some unlighted cavern coughed out the hour of four A.M.

The fear of being followed did not seem fully real, as no fear could be real to her now. She wondered whether the unnatural lightness of her body was a state of tension or relaxation; her body seemed drawn so tightly that she felt as if it were reduced to a single attribute: to the power of motion; her mind seemed inaccessibly relaxed, like a motor set to the automatic control of an absolute no longer to be questioned.

If a naked bullet could feel in mid-flight, this is what it would feel, she thought; just the motion and the goal, nothing else. She thought it vaguely, distantly, as if her own person were unreal; only the word “naked” seemed to reach her: naked... stripped of all concern but for the target... for the number “367,” the number of a house on the East River, which her mind kept repeating, the number it had so long been forbidden to consider.

Three-sixty-seven—she thought, looking for an invisible shape ahead, among the angular forms of tenements—three-sixty-seven... that is where he lives... if he lives at all... Her calm, her detachment and the confidence of her steps came from the certainty that this was an “if” with which she could not exist any longer.

She had existed with it for ten days—and the nights behind her were a single progression that had brought her to this night, as if the momentum now driving her steps were the sound of her own steps still ringing, unanswered, in the tunnels of the Terminal. She had searched for him through the tunnels, she had walked for hours, night after night—the hours of the shift he had once worked—through the underground passages and platforms and shops and every twist of abandoned tracks, asking no questions of anyone, offering no explanations of her presence. She had walked, with no sense of fear or hope, moved by a feeling of desperate loyalty that was almost a feeling of pride.

The root of that feeling was the moments when she had stopped in sudden astonishment in some dark subterranean corner and had heard the words half-stated in her mind: This is my railroad—as she looked at a vault vibrating to the sound of distant wheels; this is my life—as she felt the clot of tension, which was the stopped and the suspended within herself; this is my love—as she thought of the man who, perhaps, was somewhere in those tunnels. There can be no conflict among these three... what am I doubting?... what can keep us apart, here, where only he and I belong?... Then, recapturing the context of the present, she had walked steadily on, with the sense of the same unbroken loyalty, but the sound of different words: You have forbidden me to look for you, you may damn me, you may choose to discard me... but by the right of the fact that I am alive, I must know that you are... I must see you this once... not to stop, not to speak, not to touch you, only to see... She had not seen him. She had abandoned her search, when she had noticed the curious, wondering glances of the underground workers, following her steps.

She had called a meeting of the Terminal track laborers for the alleged purpose of boosting their morale, she had held the meeting twice, to face all the men in turn—she had repeated the same unintelligible speech, feeling a stab of shame at the empty generalities she uttered and, together, a stab of pride that it did not matter to her any longer—she had looked at the exhausted, brutalized faces of men who did not care whether they were ordered to work or to listen to meaningless sounds. She had not seen his face among them. “Was everyone present?” she had asked the foreman. “Yeah, I guess so,” he had answered indifferently.

She had loitered at the Terminal entrances, watching the men as they came to work. But there were too many entrances to cover and no place where she could watch while remaining unseen—she had stood in the soggy twilight on a sidewalk glittering with rain, pressed to the wall of a warehouse, her coat collar raised to her cheekbones, raindrops falling off the brim of her hat—she had stood exposed to the sight of the street, knowing that the glances of the men who passed her were glances of recognition and astonishment, knowing that her vigil was too dangerously obvious. If there was a John Galt among them, someone could guess the nature of her quest... if there was no John Galt among them... if there was no John Galt in the world, she thought, then no danger existed—and no world.

No danger and no world, she thought—as she walked through the streets of the slums toward a house with the number “367,” which was or was not his home. She wondered whether this was what one felt while awaiting a verdict of death: no fear, no anger, no concern, nothing but the icy detachment of light without heat or of cognition without values.

A tin can clattered from under her toes, and the sound went beating too loudly and too long, as if against the walls of an abandoned city.

The streets seemed razed by exhaustion, not by rest, as if the men inside the walls were not asleep, but had collapsed. He would be home from work at this hour, she thought... if he worked... if he still had a home... She looked at the shapes of the slums, at the crumbling plaster, the peeling paint, the fading signboards of failing shops with unwanted goods in unwashed windows, the sagging steps unsafe to climb, the clotheslines of garments unfit to wear, the undone, the unattended, the given up, the incomplete, all the twisted monuments of a losing race against two enemies: “no time” and “no strength”—and she thought that this was the place where he had lived for twelve years, he who possessed such extravagant power to lighten the job of human existence.

Some memory kept struggling to reach her, then came back: its name was Starnesville. She felt the sensation of a shudder. But this is New York City!—she cried to herself in defense of the greatness she had loved; then she faced with unmoving austerity the verdict pronounced by her mind: a city that had left him in these slums for twelve years was damned and doomed to the future of Starnesville.

Then, abruptly, it ceased to matter; she felt a peculiar shock, like the shock of sudden silence, a sense of stillness within her, which she took for a sense of calm: she saw the number “367” above the door of an ancient tenement.

She was calm, she thought, it was only time that had suddenly lost its continuity and had broken her perception into separate snatches: she knew the moment when she saw the number—then the moment when she looked at a list on a board in the moldy half-light of a doorway and saw the words “John Galt, 5th, rear” scrawled in pencil by some illiterate hand—then the moment when she stopped at the foot of a stairway, glanced up at the vanishing angles of the railing and suddenly leaned against the wall, trembling with terror, preferring not to know—then the moment when she felt the movement of her foot coming to rest on the first of the steps—then a single, unbroken progression of lightness, of rising without effort or doubt or fear, of feeling the twisting installments of stairway dropping down beneath her unhesitant feet, as if the momentum of her irresistible rise were coming from the straightness of her body, the poise of her shoulders, the lift of her head and the solemnly exultant certainty that in the moment of ultimate decision, it was not disaster she expected of her life, at the end of a rising stairway she had needed thirty-seven years to climb.

At the top, she saw a narrow hallway, its walls converging to an unlighted door. She heard the floorboards creaking in the silence, under her steps. She felt the pressure of her finger on a doorbell and heard the sound of ringing in the unknown space beyond. She waited. She heard the brief crack of a board, but it came from the floor below. She heard the sliding wail of a tugboat somewhere on the river. Then she knew that she had missed some span of time, because her next awareness was not like a moment of awakening, but like a moment of birth: as if two sounds were pulling her out of a void, the sound of a step behind the door and the sound of a lock being turned—but she was not present until the moment when suddenly there was no door before her and the figure standing on the threshold was John Galt, standing casually in his own doorway, dressed in slacks and shirt, the angle of his waistline slanting faintly against the light behind him.

She knew that his eyes were grasping this moment, then sweeping over its past and its future, that a lightning process of calculation was bringing it into his conscious control—and by the time a fold of his shirt moved with the motion of his breath, he knew the sum—and the sum was a smile of radiant greeting.

She was now unable to move. He seized her arm, he jerked her inside the room, she felt the clinging pressure of his mouth, she felt the slenderness of his body through the suddenly alien stiffness of her coat.

She saw the laughter in his eyes, she felt the touch of his mouth again and again, she was sagging in his arms, she was breathing in gasps, as if she had not breathed for five flights of stairs, her face was pressed to the angle between his neck and shoulder, to hold him, to hold him with her arms, her hands and the skin of her cheek.

“John... you’re alive...” was all she could say.

He nodded, as if he knew what the words were intended to explain.

Then he picked up her hat that had fallen to the floor, he took off her coat and put it aside, he looked at her slender, trembling figure, a sparkle of approval in his eyes, his hand moving over the tight, high collared, dark blue sweater that gave to her body the fragility of a schoolgirl and the tension of a fighter.

“The next time I see you,” he said, “wear a white one. It will look wonderful, too.”

She realized that she was dressed as she never appeared in public, as she had been dressed at home through the sleepless hours of that night. She laughed, rediscovering the ability to laugh: she had expected his first words to be anything but that.

“If there is a next time,” he added calmly.

“What... do you mean?”

He went to the door and locked it. “Sit down,” he said.

She remained standing, but she took the time to glance at the room she had not noticed: a long, bare garret with a bed in one corner and a gas stove in another, a few pieces of wooden furniture, naked boards stressing the length of the floor, a single lamp burning on a desk, a closed door in the shadows beyond the lamp’s circle—and New York City beyond an enormous window, the spread of angular structures and scattered lights, and the shaft of the Taggart Building far in the distance.

“Now listen carefully,” he said. “We have about half an hour, I think. I know why you came here. I told you that it would be hard to stand and that you would be likely to break. Don’t regret it. You see?—I can’t regret it, either. But now, we have to know how to act, from here on. In about half an hour, the looters’ agents, who followed you, will be here to arrest me.”

“Oh no!” she gasped.

“Dagny, whoever among them had any remnant of human perceptiveness would know that you’re not one of them, that you’re their last link to me, and would not let you out of his sight—or the sight of his spies.”

“I wasn’t followed! I watched, I—”

“You wouldn’t know how to notice it. Sneaking is one art they’re expert at. Whoever followed you is reporting to his bosses right now.

Your presence in this district, at this hour, my name on the board downstairs, the fact that I work for your railroad—it’s enough even for them to connect.”

“Then let’s get out of here!”

He shook his head. “They’ve surrounded the block by now. Your follower would have every policeman in the district at his immediate call. Now I want you to know what you’ll have to do when they come here. Dagny, you have only one chance to save me. If you did not quite understand what I said on the radio about the man in the middle, you’ll understand it now. There is no middle for you to take. And you cannot take my side, not so long as we’re in their hands. Now you must take their side.”

“What?”

“You must take their side, as fully, consistently and loudly as your capacity for deception will permit. You must act as one of them. You must act as my worst enemy. If you do, I’ll have a chance to come out of it alive. They need me too much, they’ll go to any extreme before they bring themselves to kill me. Whatever they extort from people, they can extort it only through their victims’ values—and they have no value of mine to hold over my head, nothing to threaten me with. But if they get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other, they will have you on a torture rack—I mean, physical torture—before my eyes, in less than a week. I am not going to wait for that. At the first mention of a threat to you, I will kill myself and stop them right there.”

He said it without emphasis, in the same impersonal tone of practical calculation as the rest. She knew that he meant it and that he was right to mean it: she saw in what manner she alone had the power to succeed at destroying him, where all the power of his enemies would fail. He saw the look of stillness in her eyes, a look of understanding and of horror. He nodded, with a faint smile.

“I don’t have to tell you,” he said, “that if I do it, it won’t be an act of self-sacrifice. I do not care to live on their terms, I do not care to obey them and I do not care to see you enduring a drawn-out murder.

There will be no values for me to seek after that—and I do not care to exist without values. I don’t have to tell you that we owe no morality to those who hold us under a gun. So use every power of deceit you can command, but convince them that you hate me. Then we’ll have a chance to remain alive and to escape—I don’t know when or how, but I’ll know that I’m free to act. Is this understood?”

She forced herself to lift her head, to look straight at him and to nod.

“When they come,” he said, “tell them that you had been trying to find me for them, that you became suspicious when you saw my name on your payroll list and that you came here to investigate.”

She nodded.

“I will stall about admitting my identity—they might recognize my voice, but I’ll attempt to deny it—so that it will be you who’ll tell them that I am the John Galt they’re seeking.”

It took her a few seconds longer, but she nodded, “Afterwards, you’ll claim—and accept—that five-hundred-thousand dollar reward they’ve offered for my capture.”

She closed her eyes, then nodded.

“Dagny,” he said slowly, “there is no way to serve your own values under their system. Sooner or later, whether you intended it or not, they had to bring you to the point where the only thing you can do for me is to turn against me. Gather your strength and do it—then we’ll earn this one half-hour and, perhaps, the future.”

I’ll do it,” she said firmly, and added, “if that is what happens, if “It will happen. Don’t regret it. I won’t. You haven’t seen the nature of our enemies. You’ll see it now. If I have to be the pawn in the demonstration that will convince you, I’m willing to be—and to win you from them, once and for all. You didn’t want to wait any longer?

Oh, Dagny, Dagny, neither did I!”

It was the way he held her, the way he kissed her mouth that made her feel as if every step she had taken, every danger, every doubt, even her treason against him, if it was treason, all of it were giving her an exultant right to this moment. He saw the struggle in her face, the tension of an incredulous protest against herself—and she heard the sound of his voice through the strands of her hair pressed to his lips: “Don’t think of them now. Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them. You’re here.

It’s our time and our life, not theirs. Don’t struggle not to be happy.

You are.”

“At the risk of destroying you?” she whispered.

“You won’t. But—yes, even that. You don’t think it’s indifference, do you? Was it indifference that broke you and brought you here?”

“I—” And then the violence of the truth made her pull his mouth down to hers, then throw the words at his face: “I didn’t care whether either one of us lived afterwards, just to see you this once!”

“I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t come.”

“Do you know what it was like, waiting, fighting it, delaying it one more day, then one more, then—”

He chuckled. “Do I?” he said softly.

Her hand dropped in a helpless gesture: she thought of his ten years. “When I heard your voice on the radio,” she said, “when I heard the greatest statement I ever... No, I have no right to tell you what I thought of it.”

“Why not?”

“You think that I haven’t accepted it.”

“You will.”

“Were you speaking from here?”

“No, from the valley.”

“And then you returned to New York?”

“The next morning.”

“And you’ve been here ever since?”

“Yes.”

“Have you heard the kind of appeals they’re sending out to you every night?”

“Sure.”

She glanced slowly about the room, her eyes moving from the towers of the city in the window to the wooden rafters of his ceiling, to the cracked plaster of his walls, to the iron posts of his bed. “You’ve been here all that time,” she said. “You’ve lived here for twelve years... here... like this...”

“Like this,” he said, throwing open the door at the end of the room.

She gasped: the long, light-flooded, windowless space beyond the threshold, enclosed in a shell of softly lustrous metal, like a small ballroom aboard a submarine, was the most efficiently modern laboratory she had ever seen.

“Come in,” he said, grinning. “I don’t have to keep secrets from you any longer.”

It was like crossing the border into a different universe. She looked at the complex equipment sparkling in a bright, diffused glow, at the mesh of glittering wires, at the blackboard chalked with mathematical formulas, at the long counters of objects shaped by the ruthless discipline of a purpose—then at the sagging boards and crumbling plaster of the garret. Either-or, she thought; this was the choice confronting the world: a human soul in the image of one or of the other.

“You wanted to know where I worked for eleven months out of the year,” he said.

“All this,” she asked, pointing at the laboratory, “on the salary of—she pointed at the garret—“of an unskilled laborer?”

“Oh, no! On the royalties Midas Mulligan pays me for his powerhouse, for the ray screen, for the radio transmitter and a few other jobs of that kind.”

“Then... then why did you have to work as a track laborer?”

“Because no money earned in the valley is ever to be spent outside.”

“Where did you get this equipment?”

“I designed it. Andrew Stockton’s foundry made it.” He pointed to an unobtrusive object the size of a radio cabinet in a corner of the room: “There’s the motor you wanted,” and chuckled at her gasp, at the involuntary jolt that threw her forward, “Don’t bother studying it, you won’t give it away to them now.”

She was staring at the shining metal cylinders and the glistening coils of wire that suggested the rusted shape resting, like a sacred relic, in a glass coffin in a vault of the Taggart Terminal.

“It supplies my own electric power for the laboratory,” he said. “No one has had to wonder why a track laborer is using such exorbitant amounts of electricity.”

“But if they ever found this place—”

He gave an odd, brief chuckle. “They won’t.”

“How long have you been—?”

She stopped; this time, she did not gasp; the sight confronting her could not be greeted by anything except a moment of total inner stillness: on the wall, behind a row of machinery, she saw a’ picture cut out of a newspaper—a picture of her, in slacks and shirt, standing by the side of the engine at the opening of the John Galt Line, her head lifted, her smile holding the context, the meaning and the sunlight of that day.

A moan was her only answer, as she turned to him, but the look on his face matched hers in the picture.

“I was the symbol of what you wanted to destroy in the world,” he said, “But you were my symbol of what I wanted to achieve.” He pointed at the picture. “This is how men expect to feel about their life once or twice, as an exception, in the course of their lifetime. But I—this is what I chose as the constant and normal.”

The look on his face, the serene intensity of his eyes and of his mind made it real to her, now, in this moment, in this moment’s full context, in this city.

When he kissed her, she knew that their arms, holding each other, were holding their greatest triumph, that this was the reality untouched by pain or fear, the reality of Halley’s Fifth Concerto, this was the reward they had wanted, fought for and won.

The doorbell rang.

Her first reaction was to draw back, his—to hold her closer and longer.

When he raised his head, he was smiling. He said only, “Now is the time not to be afraid.”

She followed him back to the garret. She heard the door of the laboratory clicking locked behind them.

He held her coat for her silently, he waited until she had tied its belt and had put on her hat—then he walked to the entrance door and opened it.

Three of the four men who entered were muscular figures in military uniforms, each with two guns on his hips, with broad faces devoid of shape and eyes untouched by perception. The fourth, their leader, was a frail civilian with an expensive overcoat, a neat mustache, pale blue eyes and the manner of an intellectual of the public-relations species.

He blinked at Galt, at the room, made a step forward, stopped, made another step and stopped.

“Yes?” said Galt.

“Are... are you John Galt?” he asked too loudly.

“That’s my name.”

“Are you the John Galt?”

“Which one?”

“Did you speak on the radio?”

“When?”

“Don’t let him fool you.” The metallic voice was Dagny’s and it was addressed to the leader. “He—is—John—Galt. I shall report the proof to headquarters. You may proceed.”

Galt turned to her as to a stranger. “Will you tell me now just who you are and what it was that you wanted here?”

Her face was as blank as the faces of the soldiers. “My name is Dagny Taggart. I wanted to convince myself that you are the man whom the country is seeking.”

He turned to the leader. “All right,” he said. “I am John Galt—but if you want me to answer you at all, keep your stool pigeon”—he pointed at Dagny—“away from me.”

“Mr. Galt!” cried the leader with the sound of an enormous joviality.

“It is an honor to meet you, an honor and a privilege! Please, Mr. Galt, don’t misunderstand us—we’re ready to grant you your wishes—no, of course, you don’t have to deal with Miss Taggart, if you prefer not to—Miss Taggart was only trying to do her patriotic duty, but—”

“I said keep her away from me.”

“We’re not your enemies, Mr. Galt, I assure you we’re not your enemies.” He turned to Dagny. “Miss Taggart, you have performed an invaluable service to the people. You have earned the highest form of public gratitude. Permit us to take over from here on.” The soothing motions of his hands were urging her to stand back, to keep out of Galt’s sight.

“Now what do you want?” asked Galt.

“The nation is waiting for you, Mr. Galt. All we want is a chance to dispel misapprehensions. Just a chance to co-operate with you.” His gloved hand was waving a signal to his three men; the floorboards creaked, as the men proceeded silently to the task of opening drawers and closets; they were searching the room. “The spirit of the nation will revive tomorrow morning, Mr. Galt, when they hear that you have been found.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to greet you in the name of the people.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Why think in such old-fashioned terms? Our job is only to escort you safely to the top councils of the national leadership, where your presence is urgently needed.” He paused, but got no answer. “The country’s top leaders desire to confer with you—just to confer and to reach a friendly understanding.”

The soldiers were finding nothing but garments and kitchen utensils; there were no letters, no books, not even a newspaper, as if the room were the habitation of an illiterate.

“Our objective is only to assist you to assume your rightful place in society, Mr. Galt. You do not seem to realize your own public value.”

“I do.”

“We are here only to protect you.”

“Locked!” declared a soldier, banging his fist against the laboratory door.

The leader assumed an ingratiating smile. “What is behind that door, Mr. Galt?”

“Private property.”

“Would you open it, please?”

“No.”

The leader spread his hands out in a gesture of pained helplessness.

“Unfortunately, my hands are tied. Orders, you know. We have to enter that room.”

“Enter it.”

“It’s only a formality, a mere formality. There’s no reason why things should not be handled amicably. Won’t you please co-operate?”

“I said, no.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t want us to resort to any... unnecessary means.” He got no answer. “We have the authority to break that door down, you know—but, of course, we wouldn’t want to do it.” He waited, but got no answer. “Force that lock!” he snapped to the soldier.

Dagny glanced at Galt’s face. He stood impassively, his head held level, she saw the undisturbed lines of his profile, his eyes directed at the door. The lock was a small, square plate of polished copper, without keyhole or fixtures.

The silence and the sudden immobility of the three brutes were involuntary, while the burglar’s tools in the hands of the fourth went grating cautiously against the wood of the door.

The wood gave way easily, and small chips fell down, their thuds magnified by the silence into the rattle of a distant gun. When the burglar’s jimmy attacked the copper plate, they heard a faint rustle behind the door, no louder than the sigh of a weary mind. In another minute, the lock fell out and the door shuddered forward the width of an inch.

The soldier jumped back. The leader approached, his steps irregular like hiccoughs, and threw the door open. They faced a black hole of unknown content and unrelieved darkness.

They glanced at one another and at Galt; he did not move; he stood looking at the darkness.

Dagny followed them, when they stepped over the threshold, preceded by the beams of their flashlights. The space beyond was a long shell of metal, empty but for heavy drifts of dust on the floor, an odd, grayish-white dust that seemed to belong among ruins undisturbed for centuries. The room looked dead like an empty skull.

She turned away, not to let them see in her face the scream of the knowledge of what that dust had been a few minutes ago. Don’t try to open that door, he had said to her at the entrance to the powerhouse of Atlantis... if you tried to break it down, the machinery inside would collapse into rubble long before the door would give way... Don’t try to open that door—she was thinking, but knew that what she was now seeing was the visual form of the statement: Don’t try to force a mind.

The men backed out in silence and went on backing toward the exit door, then stopped uncertainly, one after another, at random points of the garret, as if abandoned by a receding tide.

“Well,” said Galt, reaching for his overcoat and turning to the leader, “let’s go.”

Three floors of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been evacuated and transformed into an armed camp. Guards with machine guns stood at every turn of the long, velvet-carpeted corridors. Sentinels with bayonets stood on the landings of the fire-stairways. The elevator doors of the fifty-ninth, sixtieth and sixty-first floors were padlocked; a single door and one elevator were left as sole means of access, guarded by soldiers in full battle regalia. Peculiar-looking men loitered in the lobbies, restaurants and shops of the ground floor: their clothes were too new and too expensive, in unsuccessful imitation of the hotel’s usual patrons, a camouflage impaired by the fact that the clothes were badly fitted to their wearers’ husky figures and were further distorted by bulges in places where the garments of businessmen have no cause to bulge, but the garments of gunmen have. Groups of guards with Tommy guns were posted at every entrance and exit of the hotel, as well as at strategic windows of the adjoining streets.

In the center of this camp, on the sixtieth floor, in what was known as the royal suite of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, amidst satin drapes, crystal candelabra and sculptured garlands of Sowers, John Galt, dressed in slacks and shirt, sat in a brocaded armchair, one leg stretched out on a velvet hassock, his hands crossed behind his head, looking at the ceiling.

This was the posture in which Mr. Thompson found him, when the four guards, who had stood outside the door of the royal suite since five A.M., opened it at eleven A.M. to admit Mr. Thompson, and locked it again.

Mr. Thompson experienced a brief flash of uneasiness when the click of the lock cut off his escape and left him alone with the prisoner. But he remembered the newspaper headlines and the radio voices, which had been announcing to the country since dawn: “John Galt is found!—John Galt is in New York!—John Galt has joined the people’s cause!—John Galt is in conference with the country’s leaders, working for a speedy solution of all our problems!”—and he made himself feel that he believed it.

“Well, well, well!” he said brightly, marching up to the armchair.

“So you’re the young fellow who’s started all the trouble—Oh,” he said suddenly, as he got a closer look at the dark green eyes watching him. “Well, I... I’m tickled pink to meet you, Mr. Galt, just tickled pink.” He added, “I’m Mr. Thompson, you know.”

“How do you do,” said Galt.

Mr. Thompson thudded down on a chair, the brusqueness of the movement suggesting a cheerily businesslike attitude. “Now don’t go imagining that you’re under arrest or some such nonsense.” He pointed at the room. “This is no jail, as you can see. You can see that we’ll treat you right. You’re a big person, a very big person—and we know it.

Just make yourself at home. Ask for anything you please. Fire any flunky that doesn’t obey you. And if you take a dislike to any of the army boys outside, just breathe the word—and we’ll send another one to replace him.”

He paused expectantly. He received no answer.

“The only reason we brought you here is just that we wanted to talk to you. We wouldn’t have done it this way, but you left us no choice. You kept hiding. And all we wanted was a chance to tell you that you got us all wrong.”

He spread his hands out, palms up, with a disarming smile. Galt’s eyes were watching him, without answer.

“That was some speech you made. Boy, are you an orator! You’ve done something to the country—I don’t know what or why, but you have. People seem to want something you’ve got. But you thought we’d be dead set against it? That’s where you’re wrong. We’re not. Personally, I think there was plenty in that speech that made sense. Yes, sir, I do. Of course, I don’t agree with every word you said—but what the hell, you don’t expect us to agree with everything, do you? Differences of opinion—that’s what makes horse racing. Me, I’m always willing to change my mind. I’m open to any argument.”

He leaned forward invitingly. He obtained no answer.

“The world is in a hell of a mess. Just as you said. There, I agree with you. We have a point in common. We can start from that. Something’s got to be done about it. All I wanted was—Look,” he cried suddenly, “why don’t you let me talk to you?”

“You are talking to me.”

“I... well, that is... well, you know what I mean.”

“Fully.”

“Well?... Well, what have you got to say?”

“Nothing.”

“Huh?!”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come now!”

“I didn’t seek to talk to you.”

“But... but look!... we have things to discuss!”

“I haven’t.”

“Look,” said Mr. Thompson, after a pause, “you’re a man of action.

A practical man. Boy, are you a practical man! Whatever else I don’t quite get about you, I’m sure of that. Now aren’t you?”

“Practical? Yes.”

“Well, so am I. We can talk straight. We can put our cards on the table. Whatever it is you’re after, I’m offering you a deal.”

“I’m always open to a deal.”

“I knew it!” cried Mr. Thompson triumphantly, slamming his fist down on his own knee. “I told them so—all those fool intellectual theorizers, like Wesley!”

“I’m always open to a deal—with anyone who has a value to offer me.”

Mr. Thompson could not tell what made him miss a beat before he answered, “Well, write your own ticket, brother! Write your own ticket!”

“What have you got to offer me?”

“Why—anything.”

“Such as?”

“Anything you name. Have you heard our short-wave broadcasts to you?”

“Yes.”

“We said we’ll meet your terms, any terms. We meant it.”

“Have you heard me say on the radio that I have no terms to bargain about? I meant it.”

“Oh, but look, you misunderstood us! You thought we’d fight you. But we won’t. We’re not that rigid. We’re willing to consider any idea. Why didn’t you answer our calls and come to a conference?”

“Why should I?”

“Because... because we wanted to speak to you in the name of the country.”

“I don’t recognize your right to speak in the name of the country.”

“Now look here, I’m not used to... Well, okay, won’t you just give me a hearing? Won’t you listen?”

“I’m listening.”

“The country is in a terrible state. People are starving and giving up, the economy is falling to pieces, nobody is producing any longer. We don’t know what to do about it. You do. You know how to make things work. Okay, we’re ready to give in. We want you to tell us what to do.”

“I told you what to do.”

“What?”

“Get out of the way.”

“That’s impossible! That’s fantastic! That’s out of the question!”

“You see? I told you we had nothing to discuss.”

“Now, wait! Wait! Don’t go to extremes! There’s always a middle ground. You can’t have everything. We aren’t... people aren’t ready for it. You can’t expect us to ditch the machinery of State. We’ve got to preserve the system. But we’re willing to amend it. We’ll modify it any way you wish. We’re not stubborn, theoretical dogmatists—we’re flexible. We’ll do anything you say. We’ll give you a free hand. We’ll co-operate. We’ll compromise. We’ll split fifty-fifty. We’ll keep the sphere of politics and give you total power over the sphere of economics. We’ll turn the production, of the country over to you, we’ll make you a present of the entire economy. You’ll run it any way you wish, you’ll give the orders, you’ll issue the directives—and you’ll have the organized power of the State at your command to enforce your decisions. We’ll stand ready to obey you, all of us, from me on down. In the field of production, we’ll do whatever you say. You’ll be—you’ll be the Economic Dictator of the nation!”

Galt burst out laughing.

It was the simple amusement of the laughter that shocked Mr. Thompson. “What’s the matter with you?”

“So that’s your idea of a compromise, is it?”

“What’s the... ? Don’t sit there grinning like that!... I don’t think you understood me. I’m offering you Wesley Mouch’s job—and there’s nothing bigger that anyone could offer you!... You’ll be free to do anything you wish. If you don’t like controls—repeal them. If you want higher profits and lower wages—decree them. If you want special privileges for the big tycoons—grant them. If you don’t like labor unions—dissolve them. If you want a free economy—order people to be free! Play it any way you please. But get things going. Get the country organized. Make people work again. Make them produce. Bring back your own men—the men of brains. Lead us to a peaceful, scientific, industrial age and to prosperity.”

“At the point of a gun?”

“Now look, I... Now what’s so damn funny about it?”

“Will you tell me just one thing: if you’re able to pretend that you haven’t heard a word I said on the radio, what makes you think I’d be willing to pretend that I haven’t said it?”

“I don’t know what you mean! I—”

“Skip it. It was just a rhetorical question. The first part of it answers the second.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t play your kind of games, brother—if you want a translation.”

“Do you mean that you’re refusing my offer?”

“I am.”

“But why?”

“It took me three hours on the radio to tell you why.”

“Oh, that’s just theory! I’m talking business. I’m offering you the greatest job in the world. Will you tell me what’s wrong with it?”

“What I told you, in three hours, was that it won’t work.”

“You can make it work.”

“How?”

Mr. Thompson spread his hands out. “I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t come to you. It’s for you to figure out. You’re the industrial genius. You can solve anything.”

“I said it can’t be done.”

“You could do it.”

“How?”

“Somehow.” He heard Galt’s chuckle, and added, “Why not? Just tell me why not?”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. You want me to be the Economic Dictator?”

“Yes!”

“And you’d obey any order I give?”

“Implicitly!”

“Then start by abolishing all income taxes.”

“Oh, no!” screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. “We couldn’t do that! That’s... that’s not the field of production. That’s the field of distribution. How would we pay government employees?”

“Fire your government employees.”

“Oh, no! That’s politics! That’s not economics! You can’t interfere with politics! You can’t have everything!”

Galt crossed his legs on the hassock, stretching himself more comfortably in the brocaded armchair. “Want to continue the discussion? Or do you get the point?”

“I only—” He stopped.

“Are you satisfied that I got the point?”

“Look,” said Mr. Thompson placatingly, resuming the edge of his seat. “I don’t want to argue. I’m no good at debates. I’m a man of action. Time is short. All I know is that you’ve got a mind. Just the sort of mind we need. You can do anything. You could make things work if you wanted to.”

“All right, put it your own way: I don’t want to. I don’t want to be an Economic Dictator, not even long enough to issue that order for people to be free—which any rational human being would throw back in my face, because he’d know that his rights are not to be held, given or received by your permission or mine.”

“Tell me,” said Mr. Thompson, looking at him reflectively, “what is it you’re after?”

“I told you on the radio.”

“I don’t get it. You said that you’re out for your own selfish interest—and that, I can understand. But what can you possibly want in the future that you couldn’t get right now, from us, handed down to you on a platter? I thought you were an egoist—and a practical man. I offer you a blank check on anything you wish—and you tell me that you don’t want it, Why?”

“Because there are no funds behind your blank check.”

“What?”

“Because you have no value to offer me.”

“I can offer you anything you can ask. Just name it.”

“You name it.”

“Well, you talked a lot about wealth. If it’s money that you want—you couldn’t make in three lifetimes what I can hand over to you in a minute, this minute, cash on the barrel. Want a billion dollars—a cool, neat billion dollars?”

“Which I’ll have to produce, for you to give me?”

“No, I mean straight out of the public treasury, in fresh, new bills... or... or even in gold, if you prefer.”

“What will it buy me?”

“Oh, look, when the country gets back on its feet—”

“When I put it back on its feet?”

“Well, if what you want is to run things your own way, if it’s power that you’re after, I’ll guarantee you that every man, woman and child in this country will obey your orders and do whatever you wish.”

“After I teach them to do it?”

“If you want anything for your own gang—for all those men who’ve disappeared—jobs, positions, authority, tax exemptions, any special favor at all—just name it and they’ll get it.”

“After I bring them back?”

“Well, what on earth do you want?”

“What on earth do I need you for?”

“Huh?”

“What have you got to offer me that I couldn’t get without you?”

There was a different look in Mr. Thompson’s eyes when he drew back, as if cornered, yet looked straight at Galt for the first time and said slowly, “Without me, you couldn’t get out of this room, right now.”

Galt smiled. “True.”

“You wouldn’t be able to produce anything. You could be left here to starve.”

“True.”

“Well, don’t you see?” The loudness of homey joviality came back into Mr. Thompson’s voice, as if the hint given and received were now to be safely evaded by means of humor. “What I’ve got to offer you is your life.”

“It’s not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson,” said Galt softly.

Something about his voice made Mr. Thompson jerk to glance at him, then jerk faster to look away: Galt’s smile seemed almost gentle.

“Now,” said Galt, “do you see what I meant when I said that a zero can’t hold a mortgage over life? It’s I who’d have to grant you that kind of mortgage—and I don’t. The removal of a threat is not a payment, the negation of a negative is not a reward, the withdrawal of your armed hoodlums is not an incentive, the offer not to murder me is not a value.”

“Who... who’s said anything about murdering you?”

“Who’s said anything about anything else? If you weren’t holding me here at the point of a gun, under threat of death, you wouldn’t have a chance to speak to me at all. And that is as much as your guns can accomplish. I don’t pay for the removal of threats. I don’t buy my life from anyone.”

“That’s not true,” said Mr. Thompson brightly. “If you had a broken leg, you’d pay a doctor to set it.”

“Not if he was the one who broke it.” He smiled at Mr. Thompson’s silence. “I’m a practical man, Mr. Thompson. I don’t think it’s practical to establish a person whose sole means of livelihood is the breaking of my bones. I don’t think it’s practical to support a protection racket.”

Mr. Thompson looked thoughtful, then shook his head. “I don’t think you’re practical,” he said. “A practical man doesn’t ignore the facts of reality. He doesn’t waste his time wishing things to be different or trying to change them. He takes things as they are. We’re holding you. It’s a fact. Whether you like it or not, it’s a fact. You should act accordingly.”

“I am.”

“What I mean is, you should co-operate. You should recognize an existing situation, accept it and adjust to it.”

“If you had blood poisoning, would you adjust to it or act to change it?”

“Oh, that’s different! That’s physical!”

“You mean, physical facts are open to correction, but your whims are not?”

“Huh?”

“You mean, physical nature can be adjusted to men, but your whims are above the laws of nature, and men must adjust to you?”

“I mean that I hold the upper hand!”

“With a gun in it?”

“Oh, forget about guns! I—”

“I can’t forget a fact of reality, Mr. Thompson. That would be impractical.”

“All right, then: I hold a gun. What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll act accordingly. I’ll obey you.”

“What?”

“I’ll do whatever you tell me to.”

“Do you mean it?”

“I mean it. Literally.” He saw the eagerness of Mr. Thompson’s face ebb slowly under a look of bewilderment. “I will perform any motion you order me to perform. If you order me to move into the office of an Economic Dictator, I’ll move into it. If you order me to sit at a desk, I will sit at it. If you order me to issue a directive, I will issue the directive you order me to issue.”

“Oh, but I don’t know what directives to issue!”

“I don’t, either.”

There was a long pause.

“Well?” said Galt. “What are your orders?”

“I want you to save the economy of the country!”

“I don’t know how to save it.”

“I want you to find a way!”

“I don’t know how to find it.”

“I want you to think!”

“How will your gun make me do that, Mr. Thompson?”

Mr. Thompson looked at him silently—and Galt saw, in the tightened lips, in the jutting chin, in the narrowed eyes, the look of an adolescent bully about to utter that philosophical argument which is expressed by the sentence: I’ll bash your teeth in. Galt smiled, looking straight at him, as if hearing the unspoken sentence and underscoring it. Mr. Thompson looked away.

“No,” said Galt, “you don’t want me to think. When you force a man to act against his own choice and judgment, it’s his thinking that you want him to suspend. You want him to become a robot. I shall comply.”

Mr. Thompson sighed. “I don’t get it,” he said in a tone of genuine helplessness. “Something’s off and I can’t figure it out. Why should you ask for trouble? With a brain like yours—you can beat anybody.

I’m no match for you, and you know it. Why don’t you pretend to join us, then gain control and outsmart me?”

“For the same reason that makes you offer it: because you’d win.”

“Huh?”

“Because it’s the attempt of your betters to beat you on your terms that has allowed your kind to get away with it for centuries.

Which one of us would succeed, if I were to compete with you for control over your musclemen? Sure, I could pretend—and I wouldn’t save your economy or your system, nothing will save them now—but I’d perish and what you’d win would be what you’ve always won in the past: a postponement, one more stay of execution, for another year—or month—bought at the price of whatever hope and effort might still be squeezed out of the best of the human remnants left around you, including me. That’s all you’re after and that is the length of your range. A month? You’d settle for a week—on the unchallenged absolute that there will always be another victim to find. But you’ve found your last victim—the one who refuses to play his historical part. The game is up, brother.”

“Oh, that’s just theory!” snapped Mr. Thompson, a little too sharply; his eyes were roving about the room, in the manner of a substitute for pacing; he glanced at the door, as if longing to escape. “You say that if we don’t give up the system, we’ll perish?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then, since we’re holding you, you will perish with us?”

“Possibly.”

“Don’t you want to live?”

“Passionately.” He saw the snap of a spark in Mr. Thompson’s eyes and smiled. “I’ll tell you more: I know that I want to live much more intensely than you do. I know that that’s what you’re counting on. I know that you, in fact, do not want to live at all. I want it. And because I want it so much, I will accept no substitute.”

Mr. Thompson jumped to his feet. “That’s not true!” he cried. “My not wanting to live—it’s not true! Why do you talk like that?” He stood, his limbs drawn faintly together, as if against a sudden chill.

“Why do you say such things? I don’t know what you mean.” He backed a few steps away. “And it’s not true that I’m a gunman. I’m not. I don’t intend to harm you. I never intended to harm anybody. I want people to like me. I want to be your friend... I want to be your friend!” he cried to the space at large.

Galt’s eyes were watching him, without expression, giving him no clue to what they were seeing, except that they were seeing it.

Mr. Thompson jerked suddenly into bustling, unnecessary motions, as if he were in a hurry, “I’ve got to run along,” he said. “I... I have so many appointments. We’ll talk about it some more. Think it over. Take your time. I’m not trying to high-pressure you. Just relax, take it easy and make yourself at home. Ask for anything you like—food, drinks, cigarettes, the best of anything.” He waved his hand at Galt’s garments. “I’m going to order the most expensive tailor in the city to make some decent clothes for you. I want you to get used to the best. I want you to be comfortable and... Say,” he asked, a little too casually, “have you got any family? Any relatives you’d like to see?”

“No.”

“Any friends?”

“No.”

“Have you got a sweetheart?”

“No.”

“It’s just that I wouldn’t want you to get lonesome. We can let you have visitors, any visitor you name, if there’s anyone you care for.”

“There isn’t.”

Mr. Thompson paused at the door, turned to look at Galt for a moment and shook his head. “I can’t figure you out,” he said. “I just can’t figure you out.”

Galt smiled, shrugged and answered, “Who is John Galt?”

A whirling mesh of sleet hung over the entrance of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, and the armed guards looked oddly, desolately helpless in the circle of light: they stood hunched, heads down, hugging their guns for warmth—as if, were they to release all the spitting violence of their bullets at the storm, it would not bring comfort to their bodies.

From across the street, Chick Morrison, the Morale Conditioner—on his way to a conference on the fifty-ninth floor—noted that the rare, lethargic passers-by were not taking the trouble to glance at the guards, as they did not take the trouble to glance at the soggy headlines of a pile of unsold newspapers on the stand of a ragged, shivering vendor: “John Galt Promises Prosperity.”

Chick Morrison shook his head uneasily: six days of front-page stories—about the united efforts of the country’s leaders working with John Galt to shape new policies—had brought no results. People were moving, he observed, as if they did not care to see anything around them. No one took any notice of his existence, except a ragged old woman who stretched out her hand to him silently, as he approached the lights of the entrance; he hurried past, and only drops of sleet fell on the gnarled, naked palm.

It was his memory of the streets that gave a jagged sound to Chick Morrison’s voice, when he spoke to a circle of faces in Mr. Thompson’s room on the fifty-ninth floor. The look of the faces matched the sound of his voice.

“It doesn’t seem to work,” he said, pointing to a pile of reports from his public-pulse-takers. “All the press releases about our collaborating with John Galt don’t seem to make any difference. People don’t care. They don’t believe a word of it. Some of them say that he’ll never collaborate with us. Most of them don’t even believe that we’ve got him. I don’t know what’s happened to people. They don’t believe anything any more.” He sighed. “Three factories went out of business in Cleveland, day before yesterday. Five factories closed in Chicago yesterday. In San Francisco—”

“I know, I know,” snapped Mr. Thompson, tightening the muffler around his throat: the building’s furnace had gone out of order.

“There’s no choice about it: he’s got to give in and take over. He’s got to!”

Wesley Mouch glanced at the ceiling. “Don’t ask me to talk to him again,” he said, and shuddered. “I’ve tried. One can’t talk to that man.”

“I... I can’t, Mr. Thompson!” cried Chick Morrison, in answer to the stop of Mr. Thompson’s roving glance. “I’ll resign, if you want me to! I can’t talk to him again! Don’t make me!”

“Nobody can talk to him,” said Dr. Floyd Ferris. “It’s a waste of time. He doesn’t hear a word you say.”

Fred Kinnan chuckled. “You mean, he hears too much, don’t you?

And what’s worse, he answers it.”

“Well, why don’t you try it again?” snapped Mouch. “You seem to have enjoyed it. Why don’t you try to persuade him?”

“I know better,” said Kinnan. “Don’t fool yourself, brother. Nobody’s going to persuade him. I won’t try it twice... Enjoyed it?” he added, with a look of astonishment. “Yeah... yeah, I guess I did.”

“What’s the matter with you? Are you falling for him? Are you letting him win you over?”

“Me?” Kinnan chuckled mirthlessly. “What use would he have for me? I’ll be the first one to go down the drain when he wins... It’s only”—he glanced wistfully up at the ceiling—“it’s only that he’s a man who talks straight.”

“He won’t win!” snapped Mr. Thompson. “It’s out of the question!”

There was a long pause.

“There are hunger riots in West Virginia,” said Wesley Mouch. “And the farmers in Texas have—”

“Mr. Thompson!” said Chick Morrison desperately. “Maybe... maybe we could let the public see him... at a mass rally... or maybe on TV... just see him, just so they’d believe that we’ve really got him... It would give people hope, for a while... it would give us a little time...”

“Too dangerous,” snapped Dr. Ferris. “Don’t let him come anywhere near the public. There’s no limit to what he’ll permit himself to do.”

“He’s got to give in,” said Mr. Thompson stubbornly. “He’s got to join us. One of you must—”

“No!” screamed Eugene Lawson. “Not me! I don’t want to see him at all! Not once! I don’t want to have to believe it!”

“What?” asked James Taggart; his voice had a note of dangerously reckless mockery; Lawson did not answer. “What are you scared of?”

The contempt in Taggart’s voice sounded abnormally stressed, as if the sight of someone’s greater fear were tempting him to defy his own.

“What is it you’re scared to believe, Gene?”

“I won’t believe it! I won’t!” Lawson’s voice was half-snarl, half whimper. “You can’t make me lose my faith in humanity! You shouldn’t permit such a man to be possible! A ruthless egoist who—”

“You’re a fine bunch of intellectuals, you are,” said Mr. Thompson scornfully. “I thought you could talk to him in his own lingo—but he’s scared the lot of you. Ideas? Where are your ideas now? Do something! Make him join us! Win him over!”

“Trouble is, he doesn’t want anything,” said Mouch. “What can we offer a man who doesn’t want anything?”

“You mean,” said Kinnan, “what can we offer a man who wants to live?”

“Shut up!” screamed James Taggart. “Why did you say that? What made you say it?”

“What made you scream?” asked Kinnan.

“Keep quiet, all of you!” ordered Mr. Thompson. “You’re fine at fighting one another, but when it comes to fighting a real man—”

“So he’s got you, too?” yelled Lawson.

“Aw, pipe down,” said Mr. Thompson wearily. “He’s the toughest bastard I’ve ever been up against. You wouldn’t understand that. He’s as hard as they come...” The faintest tinge of admiration crept into his voice. “As hard as they come...”

“There are ways to persuade tough bastards,” drawled Dr. Ferris casually, “as I’ve explained to you.”

“No!” cried Mr. Thompson. “No! Shut up! I won’t listen to you! I won’t hear of it!” His hands moved frantically, as if struggling to dispel something he would not name. “I told him... that that’s not true... that we’re not... that I’m not a...” He shook his head violently, as if his own words were some unprecedented form of danger. “No, look, boys, what I mean is, we’ve got to be practical... and cautious. Damn cautious. We’ve got to handle it peacefully.

We can’t afford to antagonize him or... or harm him. We don’t dare take any chances on... anything happening to him. Because... because, if he goes, we go. He’s our last hope. Make no mistake about it. If he goes, we perish. You all know it.” His eyes swept over the faces around him: they knew it.

The sleet of the following morning fell down on front-page stories announcing that a constructive, harmonious conference between John Galt and the country’s leaders, on the previous afternoon, had produced “The John Galt Plan,” soon to be announced. The snowflakes of the evening fell down upon the furniture of an apartment house whose front wall had collapsed—and upon a crowd of men waiting silently at the closed cashier’s window of a plant whose owner had vanished.

“The farmers of South Dakota,” Wesley Mouch reported to Mr. Thompson, next morning, “are marching on the state capital, burning every government building on their way, and every home worth more than ten thousand dollars.”

“California’s blown to pieces,” he reported in the evening. “There’s a civil war going on there—if that’s what it is, which nobody seems to be sure of. They’ve declared that they’re seceding from the Union, but nobody knows who’s now in power. There’s armed fighting all over the state, between a ‘People’s Party,’ led by Ma Chalmers and her soybean cult of Orient-admirers—and something called ‘Back to God,’ led by some former oil-field owners.”

“Miss Taggart!” moaned Mr. Thompson, when she entered his hotel room next morning, in answer to his summons. “What are we going to do?”

He wondered why he had once felt that she possessed some reassuring kind of energy. He was looking at a blank face that seemed composed, but the composure became disquieting when one noticed that it lasted for minute after minute, with no change of expression, no sign of feeling. Her face had the same look as all the others, he thought, except for something in the set of the mouth that suggested endurance.

“I trust you, Miss Taggart. You’ve got more brains than all my boys,” he pleaded. “You’ve done more for the country than any of them—it’s you who found him for us. What are we to do? With everything falling to pieces, he’s the only one who can lead us out of this mess—but he won’t. He refuses. He simply refuses to lead. I’ve never seen anything like it: a man who has no desire to command. We beg him to give orders—and he answers that he wants to obey them! It’s preposterous!”

“It is.”

“What do you make of it? Can you figure him out?”

“He’s an arrogant egoist,” she said. “He’s an ambitious adventurer.

He’s a man of unlimited audacity who’s playing for the biggest stakes in the world.”

It was easy, she thought. It would have been difficult in that distant time when she had regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath—an oath of allegiance to reality and to respect for human beings. Now it was only a matter of making sounds, inarticulate sounds addressed to inanimate objects unrelated to such concepts as reality, human or honor.

It had been easy, that first morning, to report to Mr. Thompson how she had traced John Galt to his home. It had been easy to watch Mr. Thompson’s gulping smiles and his repeated cries of “That’s my girl!” uttered with glances of triumph at his assistants, the triumph of a man whose judgment in trusting her had been vindicated. It had been easy to express an angry hatred for Galt—“I used to agree with his ideas, but I won’t let him destroy my railroad!”—and to hear Mr. Thompson say, “Don’t you worry, Miss Taggart! We’ll protect you from him!”

It had been easy to assume a look of cold shrewdness and to remind Mr. Thompson of the five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward, her voice clear and cutting, like the sound of an adding machine punching out the sum of a bill. She had seen an instant’s pause in Mr. Thompson’s facial muscles, then a brighter, broader smile—like a silent speech declaring that he had not expected it, but was delighted to know what made her tick and that it was the kind of ticking he understood.

“Of course, Miss Taggart! Certainly! That reward is yours—all yours!

The check will be sent to you, in full!”

It had been easy, because she had felt as if she were in some dreary non-world, where her words and actions were not facts any longer—not reflections of reality, but only distorted postures in one of those side-show mirrors that project deformity for the perception of beings whose consciousness is not to be treated as consciousness. Thin, single and hot, like the burning pressure of a wire within her, like a needle selecting her course, was her only concern: the thought of his safety. The rest was a blur of shapeless dissolution, half-acid, half fog.

But this—she thought with a shudder—was the state in which they lived, all those people whom she had never understood, this was the state they desired, this rubber reality, this task of pretending, distorting, deceiving, with the credulous stare of some Mr. Thompson’s panic-bleary eyes as one’s only purpose and reward. Those who desired this state—she wondered—did they want to live?

“The biggest stakes in the world, Miss Taggart?” Mr. Thompson was asking her anxiously. “What is it? What does he want?”

“Reality. This earth.”

“I don’t know quite what you mean, but... Look, Miss Taggart, if you think you can understand him, would you... would you try to speak to him once more?”

She felt as if she heard her own voice, many light-years away, crying that she would give her life to see him—but in this room, she heard the voice of a meaningless stranger saying coldly, “No, Mr. Thompson, I wouldn’t. I hope I’ll never have to see him again.”

“I know that you can’t stand him, and I can’t say I blame you, but couldn’t you just try to—”

“I tried to reason with him, the night I found him. I heard nothing but insults in return. I think he resents me more than he’d resent anyone else. He won’t forgive me the fact that it was I who trapped him.

I’d be the last person to whom he would surrender.”

“Yeah... yeah, that’s true... Do you think he will ever surrender?”

The needle within her wavered for a moment, burning its oscillating way between two courses: should she say that he would not, and see them kill him?—should she say that he would, and see them hold onto their power till they destroyed the world?

“He will,” she said firmly. “He’ll give in, if you treat him right.

He’s too ambitious to refuse power. Don’t let him escape, but don’t threaten him—or harm him. Fear won’t work. He’s impervious to fear.”

“But what if... I mean, with the way things are collapsing... what if he holds out too long?”

“He won’t. He’s too practical for that. By the way, are you letting him hear any news about the state of the country?”

“Why... no.”

“I would suggest that you let him have copies of your confidential reports. He’ll see that it won’t be long now.”

“That’s a good idea! A very good idea!... You know, Miss Taggart,” he said suddenly, with the sound of some desperate clinging in his voice, “I feel better whenever I talk to you. It’s because I trust you. I don’t trust anybody around me. But you—you’re different.

You’re solid.”

She was looking unflinchingly straight at him. “Thank you, Mr. Thompson,” she said.

It had been easy, she thought—until she walked out into the street and noticed that under her coat, her blouse was sticking damply to her shoulder blades.

Were she able to feel—she thought as she walked through the concourse of the Terminal—she would know that the heavy indifference she now felt for her railroad was hatred. She could not get rid of the feeling that she was running nothing but freight trains: the passengers, to her, were not living or human. It seemed senseless to waste such enormous effort on preventing catastrophes, on protecting the safety of trains carrying nothing but inanimate objects. She looked at the faces in the Terminal: if he were to die, she thought, to be murdered by the rulers of their system, that these might continue to eat, sleep and travel—would she work to provide them with trains? If she were to scream for their help, would one of them rise to his defense?

Did they want him to live, they who had heard him?

The check for five hundred thousand dollars was delivered to her office, that afternoon; it was delivered with a bouquet of flowers from Mr. Thompson. She looked at the check and let it flutter down to her desk: it meant nothing and made her feel nothing, not even a suggestion of guilt. It was a scrap of paper, of no greater significance than the ones in the office wastebasket. Whether it could buy a diamond necklace or the city dump or the last of her food, made no difference. It would never be spent. It was not a token of value and nothing it purchased could be a value. But this—she thought—this inanimate indifference was the permanent state of the people around her, of men who had no purpose and no passion. This was the state of a non-valuing soul; those who chose it—she wondered—did they want to live?

The lights were out of order in the hall of the apartment house, when she came home that evening, numb with exhaustion—and she did not notice the envelope at her feet until she switched on the light in her foyer. It was a blank, sealed envelope that had been slipped under her door. She picked it up—and then, within a moment, she was laughing soundlessly, half-kneeling, half-sitting on the floor, not to move off that spot, not to do anything but stare at the note written by a hand she knew, the hand that had written its last message on the calendar above the city. The note said:

Dagny: Sit tight. Watch them. When he’ll need our help, call me at OR 6-5693. F.

The newspapers of the following morning admonished the public not to believe the rumors that there was any trouble in the Southern states. The confidential reports, sent to Mr. Thompson, stated that armed fighting had broken out between Georgia and Alabama, for the possession of a factory manufacturing electrical equipment—a factory cut off by the fighting and by blasted railroad tracks from any source of raw materials.

“Have you read the confidential reports I sent you?” moaned Mr. Thompson, that evening, facing Galt once more. He was accompanied by James Taggart, who had volunteered to meet the prisoner for the first time.

Galt sat on a straight-backed chair, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He seemed erect and relaxed, together. They could not decipher the expression on his face, except that it showed no sign of apprehension.

“I have,” he answered.

“There’s not much time left,” said Mr. Thompson.

“There isn’t.”

“Are you going to let such things go on?”

“Are you?”

“How can you be so sure you’re right?” cried James Taggart; his voice was not loud, but it had the intensity of a cry. “How can you take it upon yourself, at a terrible time like this, to stick to your own ideas at the risk of destroying the whole world?”

“Whose ideas should I consider safer to follow?”

“How can you be sure you’re right? How can you know? Nobody can be sure of his knowledge! Nobody! You’re no better than anyone else!”

“Then why do you want me?”

“How can you gamble with other people’s lives? How can you permit yourself such a selfish luxury as to hold out, when people need you?”

“You mean: when they need my ideas?”

“Nobody is fully right or wrong! There isn’t any black or white!

You don’t have a monopoly on truth!”

There was something wrong in Taggart’s manner—thought Mr. Thompson, frowning—some odd, too personal resentment, as if it were not a political issue that he had come here to solve.

“If you had any sense of responsibility,” Taggart was saying, “you wouldn’t dare take such a chance on nothing but your own judgment!

You would join us and consider some ideas other than your own and admit that we might be right, too! You would help us with our plans!

You would—”

Taggart went on speaking with feverish insistence, but Mr. Thompson could not tell whether Galt was listening: Galt had risen and was pacing the room, not in a manner of restlessness, but in the casual manner of a man enjoying the motion of his own body. Mr. Thompson noted the lightness of the steps, the straight spine, the flat stomach, the relaxed shoulders. Galt walked as if he were both unconscious of his body and tremendously conscious of his pride in it. Mr. Thompson glanced at James Taggart, at the sloppy posture of a tall figure slumped in ungainly self-distortion, and caught him watching Galt’s movements with such hatred that Mr. Thompson sat up, fearing it would become audible in the room. But Galt was not looking at Taggart.

“... your conscience!” Taggart was saying. “I came here to appeal to your conscience! How can you value your mind above thousands of human lives? People are perishing and—Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he snapped, “stop pacing!”

Galt stopped. “Is this an order?”

“No, no!” said Mr. Thompson hastily. “It’s not an order. We don’t want to give you orders... Take it easy, Jim.”

Galt resumed his pacing. “The world is collapsing,” said Taggart, his eyes following Galt irresistibly. “People are perishing—and it’s you who could save them! Does it matter who’s right or wrong? You should join us, even if you think we’re wrong, you should sacrifice your mind to save them!”

“By what means will I then save them?”

“Who do you think you are?” cried Taggart.

Galt stopped. “You know it.”

“You’re an egoist!”

“I am.”

“Do you realize what sort of egoist you are?”

“Do you?” asked Galt, looking straight at him.

It was the slow withdrawal of Taggart’s body into the depth of his armchair, while his eyes were holding Galt’s, that made Mr. Thompson unaccountably afraid of the next moment.

“Say,” Mr. Thompson interrupted in a brightly casual voice, “what sort of cigarette are you smoking?”

Galt turned to him and smiled. “I don’t know.”

“Where did you get it?”

“One of your guards brought me a package of them. He said some man asked him to give it to me as a present... Don’t worry,” he added, “your boys have put it through every kind of test. There were no hidden messages. It was just a present from an anonymous admirer.”

The cigarette between Galt’s fingers bore the sign of the dollar.

James Taggart was no good at the job of persuasion, Mr. Thompson concluded. But Chick Morrison, whom he brought the next day, did no better.

“I... I’ll just throw myself on your mercy, Mr. Galt,” said Chick Morrison with a frantic smile. “You’re right. I’ll concede that you’re right—and all I can appeal to is your pity. Deep down in my heart, I can’t believe that you’re a total egoist who feels no pity for the people.” He pointed to a pile of papers he had spread on a table.

“Here’s a plea signed by ten thousand schoolchildren, begging you to join us and save them. Here’s a plea from a home for the crippled. Here’s a petition sent by the ministers of two hundred different faiths. Here’s an appeal from the mothers of the country. Read them.”

“Is this an order?”

“No!” cried Mr. Thompson. “It’s not an order!”

Galt remained motionless, not extending his hand for the papers.

“These are just plain, ordinary people, Mr. Galt,” said Chick Morrison in a tone intended to project their abject humility. “They can’t tell you what to do. They wouldn’t know. They’re merely begging you. They may be weak, helpless, blind, ignorant. But you, who are so intelligent and strong, can’t you take pity on them? Can’t you help them?”

“By dropping my intelligence and following their blindness?”

“They may be wrong, but they don’t know any better!”

“But I, who do, should obey them?”

“I can’t argue, Mr. Galt. I’m just begging for your pity. They’re suffering. I’m begging you to pity those who suffer. I’m... Mr. Galt,” he asked, noticing that Galt was looking off at the distance beyond the window and that his eyes were suddenly implacable, “what’s the matter? What are you thinking of?”

“Hank Rearden.”

“Uh... why?”

“Did they feel any pity for Hank Rearden?”

“Oh, but that’s different! He—”

“Shut up,” said Galt evenly.

“I only—”

“Shut up!” snapped Mr. Thompson. “Don’t mind him, Mr. Galt.

He hasn’t slept for two nights. He’s scared out of his wits.”

Dr. Floyd Ferris, next day, did not seem to be scared—but it was worse, thought Mr. Thompson. He observed that Galt remained silent and would not answer Ferris at all.

“It’s the question of moral responsibility that you might not have studied sufficiently, Mr. Galt,” Dr. Ferris was drawling in too airy, too forced a tone of casual informality. “You seem to have talked on the radio about nothing but sins of commission. But there are also the sins of omission to consider. To fail to save a life is as immoral as to murder. The consequences are the same—and since we must judge actions by their consequences, the moral responsibility is the same.

... For instance, in view of the desperate shortage of food, it has been suggested that it might become necessary to issue a directive ordering that every third one of all children under the age of ten and of all adults over the age of sixty be put to death, to secure the survival of the rest. You wouldn’t want this to happen, would you?

You can prevent it. One word from you would prevent it. If you refuse and all those people are executed—it will be your fault and your moral responsibility!”

“You’re crazy!” screamed Mr. Thompson, recovering from shock and leaping to his feet. “Nobody’s ever suggested any such thing! Nobody’s ever considered it! Please, Mr. Galt! Don’t believe him! He doesn’t mean it!”

“Oh yes, he does,” said Galt. “Tell the bastard to look at me, then look in the mirror, then ask himself whether I would ever think that my moral stature is at the mercy of his actions.”

“Get out of here!” cried Mr. Thompson, yanking Ferris to his feet.

“Get out! Don’t let me hear another squeak out of you!” He flung the door open and pushed Ferris at the startled face of a guard outside.

Turning to Galt, he spread his arms and let them drop with a gesture of drained helplessness. Galt’s face was expressionless.

“Look,” said Mr. Thompson pleadingly, “isn’t there anybody who can talk to you?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“We’ve got to. We’ve got to convince you. Is there anyone you’d want to talk to?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe... it’s because she talks—used to talk—like you, at times... maybe if I sent Miss Dagny Taggart to tell you—”

“That one? Sure, she used to talk like me. She’s my only failure. I thought she was the kind who belonged on my side. But she double crossed me, to keep her railroad. She’d sell her soul for her railroad.

Send her in, if you want me to slap her face.”

“No, no, no! You don’t have to see her, if that’s how you feel. I don’t want to waste more time on people who rub you the wrong way...

Only... only if it’s not Miss Taggart, I don’t know whom to pick.

... If... if I could find somebody you’d be willing to consider or...”

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Galt. “There is somebody I’d like to speak to.”

“Who?” cried Mr. Thompson eagerly.

“Dr. Robert Stadler.”

Mr. Thompson emitted a long whistle and shook his head apprehensively. “That one is no friend of yours,” he said in a tone of honest warning.

“He’s the one I want to see.”

“Okay, if you wish. If you say so. Anything you wish. I’ll have him here tomorrow morning.”

That evening, dining with Wesley Mouch in his own suite, Mr. Thompson glared angrily at a glass of tomato juice placed before him. “What?

No grapefruit juice?” he snapped; his doctor had prescribed grapefruit juice as protection against an epidemic of colds.

“No grapefruit juice,” said the waiter, with an odd kind of emphasis.

“Fact is,” said Mouch bleakly, “that a gang of raiders attacked a train at the Taggart Bridge on the Mississippi. They blew up the track and damaged the bridge. Nothing serious. It’s being repaired—but all traffic is held up and the trains from Arizona can’t get through.”

“That’s ridiculous! Aren’t there any other—?” Mr. Thompson stopped; he knew that there were no other railroad bridges across the Mississippi.

After a moment, he spoke up in a staccato voice. “Order army detachments to guard the bridge. Day and night. Tell them to pick their best men for it. If anything happened to that bridge—”

He did not finish; he sat hunched, staring down at the costly china plates and the delicate hors d’oeuvres before him. The absence of so prosaic a commodity as grapefruit juice had suddenly made real to him, for the first time, what it was that would happen to the city of New York if anything happened to the Taggart Bridge.

“Dagny,” said Eddie Willers, that evening, “the bridge is not the only problem.” He snapped on her desk lamp which, in forced concentration on her work, she had neglected to turn on at the approach of dusk.

“No transcontinental trains can leave San Francisco. One of the fighting factions out there—I don’t know which one—has seized our terminal and imposed a ‘departure tax’ on trains. Meaning that they’re holding trains for ransom. Our terminal manager has quit. Nobody knows what to do there now.”

“I can’t leave New York,” she answered stonily.

“I know,” he said softly. “That’s why it’s I who’ll go there to straighten things out. At least, to find a man to put in charge.”

“No! I don’t want you to. It’s too dangerous. And what for? It doesn’t matter now. There’s nothing to save.”

“It’s still Taggart Transcontinental. I’ll stand by it, Dagny, wherever you go, you’ll always be able to build a railroad. I couldn’t. I don’t even want to make a new start. Not any more. Not after what I’ve seen. You should. I can’t. Let me do what I can.”

“Eddie! Don’t you want—” She stopped, knowing that it was useless.

“All right, Eddie. If you wish.”

“I’m flying to California tonight. I’ve arranged for space on an army plane... I know that you will quit as soon as... as soon as you can leave New York. You might be gone by the time I return. When you’re ready, just go. Don’t worry about me. Don’t wait to tell me. Go as fast as you can. I... I’ll say good-bye to you, now.”

She rose to her feet. They stood facing each other; in the dim half light of the office, the picture of Nathaniel Taggart hung on the wall between them. They were both seeing the years since that distant day when they had first learned to walk down the track of a railroad. He inclined his head and held it lowered for a long moment.

She extended her hand. “Good-bye, Eddie.”

He clasped her hand firmly, not looking down at his fingers; he was looking at her face.

He started to go, but stopped, turned to her and asked, his voice low, but steady, neither as plea nor as despair, but as a last gesture of conscientious clarity to close a long ledger, “Dagny... did you know... how I felt about you?”

“Yes,” she said softly, realizing in this moment that she had known it wordlessly for years, “I knew it.”

“Good-bye, Dagny.”

The faint rumble of an underground train went through the walls of the building and swallowed the sound of the door closing after him.

It was snowing, next morning, and melting drops were like an icy, cutting touch on the temples of Dr. Robert Stadler, as he walked down the long corridor of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, toward the door of the royal suite. Two husky men walked by his sides; they were from the department of Morale Conditioning, but did not trouble to hide what method of conditioning they would welcome a chance to employ.

“Just remember Mr. Thompson’s orders,” one of them told him contemptuously. “One wrong squawk out of you—and you’ll regret it, brother.”

It was not the snow on his temples—thought Dr. Stadler—it was a burning pressure, it had been there since that scene, last night, when he had screamed to Mr. Thompson that he could not see John Galt. He had screamed in blind terror, begging a circle of impassive faces not to make him do it, sobbing that he would do anything but that. The faces had not condescended to argue or even to threaten him; they had merely given him orders. He had spent a sleepless night, telling himself that he would not obey; but he was walking toward that door. The burning pressure on his temples and the faint, dizzying nausea of unreality came from the fact that he could not recapture the sense of being Dr. Robert Stadler.

He noticed the metallic gleam of the bayonets held by the guards at the door, and the sound of a key being turned in a lock. He found himself walking forward and heard the door being locked behind him.

Across the long room, he saw John Galt sitting on the window sill, a tall, slender figure in slacks and shirt, one leg slanting down to the floor, the other bent, his hands clasping his knee, his head of sun-streaked hair raised against a spread of gray sky—and suddenly Dr. Stadler saw the figure of a young boy sitting on the porch-railing of his home, near the campus of the Patrick Henry University, with the sun on the chestnut hair of a head lifted against a spread of summer blue, and he heard the passionate intensity of his own voice saying twenty-two years ago: “The only sacred value in the world, John, is the human mind, the inviolate human mind...”—and he cried to that boy’s figure, across the room and across the years: “I couldn’t help it, John! I couldn’t help it!”

He gripped the edge of a table between them, for support and as a protective barrier, even though the figure on the window sill had not moved.

“I didn’t bring you to this!” he cried. “I didn’t mean to! I couldn’t help it! It’s not what I intended!... John! I’m not to blame for it!

I’m not! I never had a chance against them! They own the world! They left me no place in it!... What’s reason to them? What’s science?

You don’t know how deadly they are! You don’t understand them! They don’t think! They’re mindless animals moved by irrational feelings—by their greedy, grasping, blind, unaccountable feelings! They seize whatever they want, that’s all they know: that they want it, regardless of cause, effect or logic—they want it, the bloody, grubbing pigs!... The mind? Don’t you know how futile it is, the mind, against those mindless hordes? Our weapons are so helplessly, laughably childish: truth, knowledge, reason, values, rights! Force is all they know, force, fraud and plunder!... John! Don’t look at me like that! What could I do against their fists? I had to live, didn’t I? It wasn’t for myself—it was for the future of science! I had to be left alone, I had to be protected, I had to make terms with them—there’s no way to live except on their terms—there isn’t!—do you hear me?—there isn’t!... What did you want me to do? Spend my life begging for jobs? Begging my inferiors for funds and endowments? Did you want my work to depend on the mercy of the ruffians who have a knack for making money? I had no time to compete with them for money or markets or any of their miserable material pursuit! Was that your idea of justice—that they should spend their money on liquor, yachts and women, while the priceless hours of my life were wasted for lack of scientific equipment? Persuasion? How could I persuade them? What language could I speak to men who don’t think?... You don’t know how lonely I was, how starved for some spark of intelligence! How lonely and tired and helpless! Why should a mind like mine have to bargain with ignorant fools?

They’d never contribute a penny to science! Why shouldn’t they be forced? It wasn’t you that I wanted to force! That gun was not aimed at the intellect! It wasn’t aimed at men like you and me, only at mindless materialists!... Why do you look at me that way? I had no choice!

There isn’t any choice except to beat them at their own game! Oh yes, it is their game, they set the rules! What do we count, the few who can think? We can only hope to get by, unnoticed—and to trick them into serving our aims!... Don’t you know how noble a purpose it was—my vision of the future of science? Human knowledge set free of material bonds! An unlimited end unrestricted by means! I am not a traitor, John! I’m not! I was serving the cause of the mind! What I saw ahead, what I wanted, what I felt, was not to be measured in their miserable dollars! I wanted a laboratory! I needed it! What do I care where it came from or how? I could do so much! I could reach such heights!

Don’t you have any pity? I wanted it!... What if they had to be forced? Who are they to think, anyway? Why did you teach them to rebel? It would have worked, if you hadn’t withdrawn them! It would have worked, I tell you! It wouldn’t be—like this!... Don’t accuse me! We can’t be guilty... all of us... for centuries... We can’t be so totally wrong!... We’re not to be damned! We had no choice! There is no other way to live on earth!... Why don’t you answer me? What are you seeing? Are you thinking of that speech you made? I don’t want to think of it! It was only logic! One can’t live by logic! Do you hear me?... Don’t look at me! You’re asking the impossible! Men can’t exist your way! You permit no moments of weakness, you don’t allow for human frailties or human feelings! What do you want of us? Rationality twenty-four hours a day, with no loophole, no rest, no escape?... Don’t look at me, God damn you! I’m not afraid of you any longer! Do you hear me? I am not afraid! Who are you to blame me, you miserable failure? Here’s where your road has brought you! Here you are, caught, helpless, under guard, to be killed by those brutes at any moment—and you dare to accuse me of being impractical! Oh yes, you’re going to be killed! You won’t win! You can’t be allowed to win! You are the man who has to be destroyed!”

Dr. Stadler’s gasp was a muffled scream, as if the immobility of the figure on the window sill had served as a silent reflector and had suddenly made him see the full meaning of his own words.

“No!” moaned Dr. Stadler, moving his head from side to side, to escape the unmoving green eyes. “No!... No!... No!”

Galt’s voice had the same unbending austerity as his eyes: “You have said everything I wanted to say to you.”

Dr. Stadler banged his fists against the door; when it was opened, he ran out of the room.

For three days, no one entered Galt’s suite except the guards who brought his meals. Early on the evening of the fourth day, the door opened to admit Chick Morrison with two companions. Chick Morrison was dressed in dinner clothes, and his smile was nervous, but a shade more confident than usual. One of his companions was a valet. The other was a muscular man whose face seemed to clash with his tuxedo: it was a stony face with sleepy eyelids, pale, darting eyes and a prizefighter’s broken nose; his skull was shaved except for a patch of faded blond curls on top; he kept his right hand in the pocket of his trousers.

“You will please dress, Mr. Galt,” said Chick Morrison persuasively, pointing to the door of the bedroom, where a closet had been filled with expensive garments which Galt had not chosen to wear. “You will please put on your dinner clothes.” He added, “This is an order, Mr. Galt.”

Galt walked silently into the bedroom. The three men followed. Chick Morrison sat on the edge of a chair, starting and discarding one cigarette after another. The valet went through too many too courteous motions, helping Galt to dress, handing him his shirt studs, holding his coat. The muscular man stood in a corner, his hand in his pocket. No one said a word.

“You will please co-operate, Mr. Galt,” said Chick Morrison, when Galt was ready, and indicated the door with a courtly gesture of invitation to proceed.

So swiftly that no one could catch the motion of his hand, the muscular man was holding Galt’s arm and pressing an invisible gun against his ribs. “Don’t make any false moves,” he said in an expressionless voice.

“I never do,” said Galt.

Chick Morrison opened the door. The valet stayed behind. The three figures in dinner clothes walked silently down the hall to the elevator.

They remained silent in the elevator, the clicks of the flashing numbers above the door marking their downward progress.

The elevator stopped on the mezzanine floor. Two armed soldiers preceded them and two others followed, as they walked through the long, dim corridors. The corridors were deserted except for armed sentinels posted at the turns. The muscular man’s right arm was linked to Galt’s left; the gun remained invisible to any possible observer. Galt felt the small pressure of the muzzle against his side; the pressure was expertly maintained: not to be felt as an impediment and not to be forgotten for a moment.

The corridor led to a wide, closed doorway. The soldiers seemed to melt away into the shadows, when Chick Morrison’s hand touched the doorknob. It was his hand that opened the door, but the sudden contrast of light and sound made it seem as if the door were flung open by an explosion: the light came from three hundred bulbs in the blazing chandeliers of the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel; the sound was the applause of five hundred people.

Chick Morrison led the way to the speakers’ table raised on a platform above the tables filling the room. The people seemed to know, without announcement, that of the two figures following him, it was the tall, slender man with the gold-copper hair that they were applauding. His face had the same quality as the voice they had heard on the radio : calm, confident—and out of reach.

The seat reserved for Galt was the place of honor in the center of the long table, with Mr. Thompson waiting for him at his right and the muscular man slipping skillfully into the seat at his left, not relinquishing his arm or the pressure of the muzzle. The jewels on the naked shoulders of women carried the glitter of the chandeliers to the shadows of the tables crowded against the distant walls; the severe black-and white of the men’s figures rescued the room’s style of solemnly regal luxury from the discordant slashes made by news cameras, microphones and a dormant array of television equipment. The crowd was on its feet, applauding. Mr. Thompson was smiling and watching Galt’s face, with the eager, anxious look of an adult waiting for a child’s reaction to a spectacularly generous gift. Galt sat facing the ovation, neither ignoring it nor responding.

“The applause you are hearing,” a radio announcer was yelling into a microphone in a corner of the room, “is in greeting to John Galt, who has just taken his place at the speakers’ table! Yes, my friends, John Galt in person—as those of you who can find a television set will have a chance to see for yourself in a short while!”

I must remember where I am—thought Dagny, clenching her fists under the tablecloth, in the obscurity of a side table. It was hard to maintain a sense of double reality in the presence of Galt, thirty feet away from her. She felt that no danger or pain could exist in the world so long as she could see his face—and, simultaneously, an icy terror, when she looked at those who held him in their power, when she remembered the blind irrationality of the event they were staging. She fought to keep her facial muscles rigid, not to betray herself by a smile of happiness or by a scream of panic.

She wondered how his eyes had been able to find her in that crowd.

She had seen the brief pause of his glance, which no one else could notice; the glance had been more than a kiss, it had been a handshake of approval and support.

He did not glance again in her direction. She could not force herself to look away. It was startling to see him in evening clothes and more startling still that he wore them so naturally; he made them look like a work uniform of honor; his figure suggested the kind of banquet, in the days of a distant past, where he would have been receiving an industrial award. Celebrations—she remembered her own words, with a stab of longing—should be only for those who have something to celebrate.

She turned away. She struggled not to look at him too often, not to attract the attention of her companions. She had been placed at a table prominent enough to display her to the assembly, but obscure enough to keep her out of the line of Galt’s sight, along with those who had incurred Galt’s disfavor: with Dr. Ferris and Eugene Lawson.

Her brother Jim, she noted, had been placed closer to the platform; she could see his sullen face among the nervous figures of Tinky Holloway, Fred Kinnan, Dr. Simon Pritchett. The tortured faces strung out above the speakers’ table were not succeeding in their efforts to hide that they looked like men enduring an ordeal; the calm of Galt’s face seemed radiant among them; she wondered who was prisoner here and who was master. Her glance moved slowly down the line-up of his table: Mr. Thompson, Wesley Mouch, Chick Morrison, some generals, some members of the Legislature and, preposterously, Mr. Mowen chosen as a bribe to Galt, as a symbol of big business. She glanced about the room, looking for the face of Dr. Stadler; he was not present.

The voices filling the room were like a fever chart, she thought; they kept darting too high and collapsing into patches of silence; the occasional spurts of someone’s laughter broke off, incompleted, and attracted the shuddering turn of the heads at the neighboring tables. The faces were drawn and twisted by the most obvious and least dignified form of tension: by forced smiles. These people—she thought—knew, not by means of their reason, but by means of their panic, that this banquet was the ultimate climax and the naked essence of their world. They knew that neither their God nor their guns could make this celebration mean what they were struggling to pretend it meant.

She could not swallow the food that was placed before her; her throat seemed closed by a rigid convulsion. She noticed that the others at her table were also merely pretending to eat. Dr. Ferris was the only one whose appetite seemed unaffected.

When she saw a slush of ice cream in a crystal bowl before her, she noticed the sudden silence of the room and heard the screeching of the television machinery being dragged forward for action. Now—she thought, with a sinking sense of expectation, and knew that the same question mark was on every mind in the room. They were all staring at Galt. His face did not move or change.

No one had to call for silence, when Mr. Thompson waved to an announcer: the room did not seem to breathe.

“Fellow citizens,” the announcer cried into a microphone, “of this country and of any other that’s able to listen—from the grand ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel in New York City, we are bringing you the inauguration of the John Galt Plan!”

A rectangle of tensely bluish light appeared on the wall behind the speakers’ table—a television screen to project for the guests the images which the country was now to see.

“The John Galt Plan for Peace, Prosperity and Profit!” cried the announcer, while a shivering picture of the ballroom sprang into view on the screen. “The dawn of a new age! The product of a harmonious collaboration between the humanitarian spirit of our leaders and the scientific genius of John Galt! If your faith in the future has been undermined by vicious rumors, you may now see for yourself our happily united family of leadership!... Ladies and gentlemen”—as the television camera swooped down to the speakers’ table, and the stupefied face of Mr. Mowen filled the screen—“Mr. Horace Bussby Mowen, the American Industrialist!” The camera moved to an aged collection of facial muscles shaped in imitation of a smile. “General of the Army Whittington S. Thorpe!” The camera, like an eye at a police line-up, moved from face to scarred face—scarred by the ravages of fear, of evasion, of despair, of uncertainty, of self-loathing, of guilt. “Majority Leader of the National Legislature, Mr. Lucian Phelps!... Mr. Wesley Mouch!... Mr. Thompson!” The camera paused on Mr. Thompson; he gave a big grin to the nation, then turned and looked off screen, to his left, with an air of triumphant expectancy. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said solemnly, “John Galt!”

Good God!—thought Dagny—what are they doing? From the screen, the face of John Galt was looking at the nation, the face without pain or fear or guilt, implacable by virtue of serenity, invulnerable by virtue of self-esteem. This face—she thought—among those others?

Whatever it is that they’re planning, she thought, it’s undone—nothing more can or has to be said—there’s the product of one code and of the other, there’s the choice, and whoever is human will know it.

“Mr. Galt’s personal secretary,” said the announcer, while the camera blurred hastily past the next face and went on. “Mr. Clarence ‘Chick’ Morrison... Admiral Homer Dawley... Mr.—”

She looked at the faces around her, wondering: Did they see the contrast? Did they know it? Did they see him? Did they want him to be real?

“This banquet,” said Chick Morrison, who had taken over as master of ceremonies, “is in honor of the greatest figure of our time, the ablest producer, the man of the ‘know-how,’ the new leader of our economy—John Galt! If you have heard his extraordinary radio speech, you can have no doubt that he can make things work. Now he is here to tell you that he will make them work for you. If you have been misled by those old-fashioned extremists who claimed that he would never join us, that no merger is possible between his way of life and ours, that it’s either one or the other—tonight’s event will prove to you that anything can be reconciled and united!”

Once they have seen him—thought Dagny—can they wish to look at anybody else? Once they know that he is possible, that this is what man can be, what else can they want to seek? Can they now feel any desire except to achieve in their souls what he has achieved in his? Or are they going to be stopped by the fact that the Mouches, the Morrisons, the Thompsons of the world had not chosen to achieve it? Are they going to regard the Mouches as the human and him as the impossible?

The camera was roving over the ballroom, flashing to the screen and to the country the faces of the prominent guests, the faces of the tensely watchful leaders and—once in a while—the face of John Galt. He looked as if his perceptive eyes were studying the men outside this room, the men who were seeing him across the country; one could not tell whether he was listening: no reaction altered the composure of his face.

“I am proud to pay tribute tonight,” said the leader of the Legislature, the next speaker, “to the greatest economic organizer the world has ever discovered, the most gifted administrator, the most brilliant planner—John Galt, the man who will save us! I am here to thank him in the name of the people!”

This—thought Dagny, with a sickened amusement—was the spectacle of the sincerity of the dishonest. The most fraudulent part of the fraud was that they meant it. They were offering Galt the best that their view of existence could offer, they were trying to tempt him with that which was their dream of life’s highest fulfillment: this spread of mindless adulation, the unreality of this enormous pretense—approval without standards, tribute without content, honor without causes, admiration without reasons, love without a code of values.

“We have discarded all our petty differences,” Wesley Mouch was now saying into the microphone, “all partisan opinions, all personal interests and selfish views—in order to serve under the selfless leadership of John Galt!”

Why are they listening?—thought Dagny. Don’t they see the hallmark of death in those faces, and the hallmark of life in his?

Which state do they wish to choose? Which state do they seek for mankind?... She looked at the faces in the ballroom. They were nervously blank; they showed nothing but the sagging weight of lethargy and the staleness of a chronic fear. They were looking at Galt and at Mouch, as if unable to perceive any difference between them or to feel concern if a difference existed, their empty, uncritical, unvaluing stare declaring: “Who am I to know?” She shuddered, remembering his sentence: “The man who declares, ‘Who am I to know?’ is declaring, ‘Who am I to live?’” Did they care to live?—she thought. They did not seem to care even for the effort of raising that question... She saw a few faces who seemed to care. They were looking at Galt with a desperate plea, with a wistfully tragic admiration—and with hands lying limply on the tables before them.

These were the men who saw what he was, who lived in frustrated longing for his world—but tomorrow, if they saw him being murdered before them, their hands would hang as limply and their eyes would look away, saying, “Who am I to act?”

“Unity of action and purpose,” said Mouch, “will bring us to a happier world...”

Mr. Thompson leaned toward Galt and whispered with an amiable smile, “You’ll have to say a few words to the country, later on, after me. No, no, not a long speech, just a sentence or two, no more.

Just ‘hello, folks’ or something like that, so they’ll recognize your voice.” The faintly stressed pressure of the “secretary’s” muzzle against Galt’s side added a silent paragraph. Galt did not answer.

“The John Galt Plan,” Wesley Mouch was saying, “will reconcile all conflicts. It will protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor. It will cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits. It will lower prices and raise wages. It will give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations. It will combine the efficiency of free enterprise with the generosity of a planned economy.”

Dagny observed some faces—it took her an effort fully to believe it—who were looking at Galt with hatred. Jim was one of them, she noted. When the image of Mouch held the screen, these faces were relaxed in bored contentment, which was not pleasure, but the comfort of license, of knowing that nothing was demanded of them and nothing was firm or certain. When the camera flashed the image of Galt, their lips grew tight and their features were sharpened by a look of peculiar caution. She felt with sudden certainty that they feared the precision of his face, the unyielding clarity of his features, the look of being an entity, a look of asserting existence. They hate him for being himself—she thought, feeling a touch of cold horror, as the nature of their souls became real to her—they hate him for his capacity to live.

Do they want to live?—she thought in self-mockery. Through the stunned numbness of her mind, she remembered the sound of his sentence: “The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be.”

It was now Mr. Thompson who was yelling into the microphone in his briskest and folksiest manner: “And I say to you: kick them in the teeth, all those doubters who’re spreading disunity and fear! They told you that John Galt would never join us, didn’t they? Well, here he is, in person, of his own free choice, at this table and at the head of our State! Ready, willing and able to serve the people’s cause!

Don’t you ever again, any of you, start doubting or running or giving up! Tomorrow is here today—and what a tomorrow! With three meals a day for everyone on earth, with a car in every garage, and with electric power given free, produced by some sort of a motor the like of which we’ve never seen! And all you have to do is just be patient a little while longer! Patience, faith and unity—that’s the recipe, for progress! We must stand united among ourselves and united with the rest of the world, as a great big happy family, all working for the good of all! We have found a leader who will beat the record of our richest and busiest past! It’s his love for mankind that has made him come here—to serve you, protect you and take care of you! He has heard your pleas and has answered the call of our common human duty! Every man is his brother’s keeper! No man is an island unto himself! And now you will hear his voice—now you will hear his own message!... “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said solemnly, “John Galt—to the collective family of mankind!”

The camera moved to Galt. He remained still for a moment. Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary’s hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sidewise, leaving the pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world—then, standing straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said: “Get the hell out of my way!”

CHAPTER IX THE GENERATOR

“Get the hell out of my way!”

Dr. Robert Stadler heard it on the radio in his car. He did not know whether the next sound, part-gasp, part-scream, part-laughter, started rising from him or from the radio—but he heard the click that cut them both off. The radio went dead. No further sounds came from the Wayne-Falkland Hotel.

He jerked his hand from knob to knob under the lighted dial. Nothing came through, no explanations, no pleas of technical trouble, no silence-hiding music. All stations were off the air.

He shuddered, he gripped the wheel, leaning forward across it, like a jockey at the close of a race, and his foot pressed down on the accelerator. The small stretch of highway before him bounced with the leaping of his headlights. There was nothing beyond the lighted strip but the emptiness of the prairies of Iowa.

He did not know why he had been listening to the broadcast; he did not know what made him tremble now. He chuckled abruptly—it sounded like a malevolent growl—either at the radio, or at those in the city, or at the sky.

He was watching the rare posts of highway numbers. He did not need to consult a map: for four days, that map had been printed on his brain, like a net of lines traced in acid. They could not take it away from him, he thought; they could not stop him. He felt as if he were being pursued; but there was nothing for miles behind him, except the two red lights on the rear of his car—like two small signals of danger, fleeing through the darkness of the Iowa plains.

The motive directing his hands and feet was four days behind him. It was the face of the man on the window sill, and the faces he had confronted when he had escaped from that room. He had cried to them that he could not deal with Galt and neither could they, that Galt would destroy them all, unless they destroyed him first. “Don’t get smart, Professor,” Mr. Thompson had answered coldly. “You’ve done an awful lot of yelling about hating his guts, but when it comes to action, you haven’t helped us at all. I don’t know which side you’re on. If he doesn’t give in to us peaceably, we might have to resort to pressure—such as hostages whom he wouldn’t want to see hurt—and you’re first on the list, Professor.” “I?” he had screamed, shaking with terror and with bitterly desperate laughter. “I? But he damns me more than anyone on earth!” “How do I know?” Mr. Thompson had answered. “I hear that you used to be his teacher. And, don’t forget, you’re the only one he asked for.”

His mind liquid with terror, he had felt as if he were about to be crushed between two walls advancing upon him: he had no chance, if Galt refused to surrender—and less chance, if Galt joined these men.

It was then that a distant shape had come swimming forward in his mind: the image of a mushroom-domed structure in the middle of an Iowa plain.

All images had begun to fuse in his mind thereafter. Project X—he had thought, not knowing whether it was the vision of that structure or of a feudal castle commanding the countryside, that gave him the sense of an age and a world to which he belonged... I’m Robert Stadler—he had thought—it’s my property, it came from my discoveries, they said it was I who invented it... I’ll show them!—he had thought, not knowing whether he meant the man on the window sill or the others or the whole of mankind... His thoughts had become like chips floating in a liquid, without connections: To seize control...

I’ll show them!... To seize control, to rule... There is no other way to live on earth...

These had been the only words that named the plan in his mind. He had felt that the rest was clear to him—clear in the form of a savage emotion crying defiantly that he did not have to make it clear. He would seize control of Project X and he would rule a part of the country as his private feudal domain. The means? His emotion had answered: Somehow. The motive? His mind had repeated insistently that his motive was terror of Mr. Thompson’s gang, that he was not safe among them any longer, that his plan was a practical necessity. In the depth of his liquid brain, his emotion had held another kind of terror, drowned along with the connections between his broken chips of words.

These chips had been the only compass directing his course through four days and nights—while he drove down deserted highways, across a country collapsing into chaos, while he developed a monomaniac’s cunning for obtaining illegal purchases of gas, while he snatched random hours of restless sleep, in obscure motels, under assumed names...

I’m Robert Stadler—he had thought, his mind repeating it as a formula of omnipotence... To seize control—he had thought, speeding against the futile traffic lights of half-abandoned towns—speeding on the vibrating steel of the Taggart Bridge across the Mississippi—speeding past the occasional ruins of farms in the empty stretches of Iowa... I’ll show them—he had thought—let them pursue, they won’t stop me this time... He had thought it, even though no one had pursued him—as no one was pursuing him now, but the taillights of his own car and the motive drowned in his mind.

He looked at his silent radio and chuckled; the chuckle had the emotional quality of a fist being shaken at space. It’s I who am practical—he thought—I have no choice... I have no other way... I’ll show all those insolent gangsters, who forget that I am Robert Stadler... They will all collapse, but I won’t!... I’ll survive!... I’ll win!... I’ll show them!

The words were like chunks of solid ground in his mind, in the midst of a fiercely silent swamp; the connections lay submerged at the bottom.

If connected, his words would have formed the sentence: I’ll show him that there is no other way to live on earth!...

The scattered lights in the distance ahead were the barracks erected on the site of Project X, now known as Harmony City. He observed, as he came closer, that something out of the ordinary was going on at Project X, The barbed-wire fence was broken, and no sentinels met him at the gate. But some sort of abnormal activity was churning in the patches of darkness and in the glare of some wavering spotlights: there were armored trucks and running figures and shouted orders and the gleam of bayonets. No one stopped his car. At the corner of a shanty, he saw the motionless body of a soldier sprawled on the ground.

Drunk—he thought, preferring to think it, wondering why he felt unsure of it.

The mushroom structure crouched on a knoll before him; there were lights in the narrow slits of its windows—and the shapeless funnels protruded from under its dome, aimed at the darkness of the country. A soldier barred his way, when he alighted from his car at the entrance.

The soldier was properly armed, but hatless, and his uniform seemed too sloppy. “Where are you going, bud?” he asked.

“Let me in!” Dr. Stadler ordered contemptuously.

“What’s your business here?”

“I’m Dr. Robert Stadler.”

“I’m Joe Blow. I said, What’s your business? Are you one of the new or one of the old?”

“Let me in, you idiot! I’m Dr. Robert Stadler!”

It was not the name, but the tone of voice and the form of address that seemed to convince the soldier. “One of the new,” he said and, opening the door, shouted to somebody inside, “Hey, Mac, take care of Grandpaw here, see what he wants!”

In the bare, dim hall of reinforced concrete, he was met by a man who might have been an officer, except that his tunic was open at the throat and a cigarette hung insolently in the corner of his mouth.

“Who are you?” he snapped, his hand jerking too swiftly to the holster on his hip.

“I’m Dr. Robert Stadler.”

The name had no effect. “Who gave you permission to come here?”

“I need no permission.”

This seemed to have an effect; the man removed the cigarette from his mouth. “Who sent for you?” he asked, a shade uncertainly.

“Will you please let me speak to the commandant?” Dr. Stadler demanded impatiently.

“The commandant? You’re too late, brother.”

“The chief engineer, then!”

“The chief-who? Oh, Willie? Willie’s okay, he’s one of us, but he’s out on an errand just now.”

There were other figures in the hall, listening with an apprehensive curiosity. The officer’s hand summoned one of them to approach—an unshaved civilian with a shabby overcoat thrown over his shoulders.

“What do you want?” he snapped at Stadler.

“Would someone please tell me where are the gentlemen of the scientific staff?” Dr. Stadler asked in the courteously peremptory tone of an order.

The two men glanced at each other, as if such a question were irrelevant in this place. “Do you come from Washington?” the civilian asked suspiciously.

“I do not. I will have you understand that I’m through with that Washington gang.”

“Oh?” The man seemed pleased. “Are you a Friend of the People, then?”

“I would say that I’m the best friend the people ever had. I’m the man who gave them all this.” He pointed around him.

“You did?” said the man, impressed. “Are you one of those who made a deal with the Boss?”

“I’m the boss here, from now on.”

The men looked at each other, retreating a few steps. The officer asked, “Did you say the name was Stadler?”

“Robert Stadler. And if you don’t know what that means, you’ll find out!”

“Will you please follow me, sir?” said the officer, with shaky politeness.

What happened next was not clear to Dr. Stadler, because his mind refused to admit the reality of the things he was seeing. There were shifting figures in half-lighted, disordered offices, there were too many firearms on everybody’s hips, there were senseless questions asked of him by jerky voices that alternated between impertinence and fear.

He did not know whether any of them tried to give him an explanation; he would not listen; he could not permit this to be true. He kept stating in the tone of a feudal sovereign, “I’m the boss here, from now on... I give the orders... I came to take over... I own this place... I am Dr. Robert Stadler—and if you don’t know that name in this place, you have no business being here, you infernal idiots! You’ll blow yourselves to pieces, if that’s the state of your knowledge! Have you had a high-school course in physics? You don’t look to me as if you’ve ever been allowed inside a high school, any of you! What are you doing here? Who are you?”

It took him a long time to grasp—when his mind could not block it any longer—that somebody had beaten him to his plan: somebody had held the same view of existence as his own and had set out to achieve the same future. He grasped that these men, who called themselves the Friends of the People, had seized possession of Project X, tonight, a few hours ago, intending to establish a reign of their own. He laughed in their faces, with bitterly incredulous contempt. “You don’t know what you’re doing, you miserable juvenile delinquents! Do you think that you—you!—can handle a high-precision instrument of science? Who is your leader? I demand to see your leader!”

It was his tone of overbearing authority, his contempt and their own panic—the blind panic of men of unbridled violence, who have no standards of safety or danger—that made them waver and wonder whether he was, perhaps, some secret top-level member of their leadership; they were equally ready to defy or to obey any authority. After being shunted from one jittery commander to another, he found himself at last being led down iron stairways and down long, echoing, underground corridors of reinforced concrete to an audience with “The Boss” in person. The Boss had taken refuge in the underground control room.

Among the complex spirals of the delicate scientific machinery that produced the sound ray, against the wall panel of glittering levers, dials and gauges, known as the Xylophone, Robert Stadler faced the new ruler of Project X. It was Cuffy Meigs.

He wore a tight, semi-military tunic and leather leggings; the flesh of his neck bulged over the edge of his collar; his black curls were matted with sweat. He was pacing restlessly, unsteadily in front of the Xylophone, shouting orders to men who kept rushing in and out of the room: “Send couriers to every county seat within our reach! Tell ’em that the Friends of the People have won! Tell ’em they’re not to take orders from Washington any longer! The new capital of the People’s Commonwealth is Harmony City, henceforth to be known as Meigsville! Tell ’em that I’ll expect five hundred thousand dollars per every five thousand heads of population, by tomorrow morning—or else!”

It took some time before Cuffy Meigs’ attention and bleary brown eyes could be drawn to focus on the person of Dr. Stadler. “Well, what is it? What is it?” he snapped.

“I am Dr. Robert Stadler.”

“Huh?— Oh, yeah! Yeah! You’re the big guy from outer spaces, aren’t you? You’re the fellow who catches atoms or something. Well, what on earth are you doing here?”

“It is I who should ask you that question.”

“Huh? Look, Professor, I’m in no mood for jokes.”

“I have come here to take control.”

“Control? Of what?”

“Of this equipment. Of this place. Of the countryside within its radius of operation.”

Meigs stared at him blankly for a moment, then asked softly, “How did you get here?”

“By car.”

“I mean, whom did you bring with you?”

“Nobody.”

“What weapons did you bring?”

“None. My name is sufficient.”

“You came here alone, with your name and your car?”

“I did.”

Cuffy Meigs burst out laughing in his face.

“Do you think,” asked Dr. Stadler, “that you can operate an installation of this kind?”

“Run along, Professor, run along! Beat it, before I have you shot!

We’ve got no use for intellectuals around here!”

“How much do you know about this?” Dr. Stadler pointed at the Xylophone.

“Who cares? Technicians are a dime a dozen these days! Beat it!

This ain’t Washington! I’m through with those impractical dreamers in Washington! They won’t get anywhere, bargaining with that radio ghost and making speeches! Action—that’s what’s needed! Direct action!

Beat it, Doc! Your day is over!” He was weaving unsteadily back and forth, catching at a lever of the Xylophone once in a while. Dr. Stadler realized that Meigs was drunk.

“Don’t touch those levers, you fool!”

Meigs jerked his hand back involuntarily, then waved it defiantly at the panel. “I’ll touch anything I please! Don’t you tell-me what to do!”

“Get away from that panel! Get out of here! This is mine! Do you understand? It’s my property!”

“Property? Huh!” Meigs gave a brief bark that was a chuckle.

“I invented it! I created it! I made it possible!”

“You did? Well, many thanks, Doc. Many thanks, but we don’t need you any longer. We’ve got our own mechanics.”

“Have you any idea what I had to know in order to make it possible?

You couldn’t think of a single tube of it! Not a single bolt!”

Meigs shrugged. “Maybe not.”

“Then how dare you think that you can own it? How dare you come here? What claim do you have to it?”

Meigs patted his holster. “This.”

“Listen, you drunken lout!” cried Dr. Stadler. “Do you know what you’re playing with?”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, you old fool! Who are you to talk to me like that? I can break your neck with my bare hands! Don’t you know who I am?”

“You’re a scared thug way out of his depth!”

“Oh, I am, am I? I’m the Boss! I’m the Boss and I’m not going to be stopped by an old scarecrow like you! Get out of here!”

They stood staring at each other for a moment, by the panel of the Xylophone, both cornered by terror. The unadmitted root of Dr. Stadler’s terror was his frantic struggle not to acknowledge that he was looking at his final product, that this was his spiritual son. Cuffy Meigs’ terror had wider roots, it embraced all of existence; he had lived in chronic terror all his life, but now he was struggling not to acknowledge what it was that he had dreaded: in the moment of his triumph, when he expected to be safe, that mysterious, occult breed—the intellectual—was refusing to fear him and defying his power.

“Get out of here!” snarled Cuffy Meigs. “I’ll call my men! I’ll have you shot!”

“Get out of here, you lousy, brainless, swaggering moron!” snarled Dr. Stadler. “Do you think I’ll let you cash in on my life? Do you think it’s for you that I... that I sold—” He did not finish. “Stop touching those levers, God damn you!”

“Don’t you give me orders! I don’t need you to tell me what to do!

You’re not going to scare me with your classy mumbo-jumbo! I’ll do as I please! What did I fight for, if I can’t do as I please?” He chuckled and reached for a lever.

“Hey, Cuffy, take it easy!” yelled some figure in the back of the room, darting forward.

“Stand back!” roared Cuffy Meigs. “Stand back, all of you! Scared, am I? I’ll show you who’s boss!”

Dr. Stadler leaped to stop him—but Meigs shoved him aside with one arm, gave a gulp of laughter at the sight of Stadler falling to the floor, and, with the other arm, yanked a lever of the Xylophone.

The crash of sound—the screeching crash of ripped metal and of pressures colliding on conflicting circuits, the sound of a monster turning upon itself—was heard only inside the structure. No sound was heard outside. Outside, the structure merely rose into the air, suddenly and silently, cracked open into a few large pieces, shot some hissing streaks of blue light to the sky and came down as a pile of rubble. Within the circle of a radius of a hundred miles, enclosing parts of four states, telegraph poles fell like matchsticks, farmhouses collapsed into chips, city buildings went down as if slashed and minced by a single second’s blow, with no time for a sound to be heard by the twisted bodies of the victims—and, on the circle’s periphery, halfway across the Mississippi, the engine and the first six cars of a passenger train flew as a shower of metal into the water of the river, along with the western spans of the Taggart Bridge, cut in half.

On the site of what had once been Project X, nothing remained alive among the ruins—except, for some endless minutes longer, a huddle of torn flesh and screaming pain that had once been a great mind.

There was a sense of weightless freedom—thought Dagny—in the feeling that a telephone booth was her only immediate, absolute goal, with no concern for any of the goals of the passers-by in the streets around her. It did not make her feel estranged from the city: it made her feel, for the first time, that she owned the city and that she loved it, that she had never loved it before as she did in this moment, with so personal, solemn and confident a sense of possession. The night was still and clear; she looked at the sky; as her feeling was more solemn than joyous, but held the sense of a future joy—so the air was more windless than warm, but held the hint of a distant spring.

Get the hell out of my way—she thought, not with resentment, but almost with amusement, with a sense of detachment and deliverance, addressing it to the passers-by, to the traffic when it impeded her hurried progress, and to any fear she had known in the past. It was less than an hour ago that she had heard him utter that sentence, and his voice still seemed to ring in the air of the streets, merging into a distant hint of laughter.

She had laughed exultantly, in the ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland, when she had heard him say it; she had laughed, her hand pressed to her mouth, so that the laughter was only in her eyes—and in his, when he had looked straight at her and she had known that he heard it. They had looked at each other for the span of a second, above the heads of the gasping, screaming crowd—above the crash of the microphones being shattered, though all stations had been instantly cut off—above the bursts of breaking glass on falling tables, as some people went stampeding to the doors.

Then she had heard Mr. Thompson cry, waving his arm at Galt, “Take him back to his room, but guard him with your lives!”—and the crowd had parted as three men led him out. Mr. Thompson seemed to collapse for a moment, dropping his forehead on his arm, but he rallied, jumped to his feet, waved vaguely at his henchmen to follow and rushed out, through a private side exit. No one addressed or instructed the guests: some were running blindly to escape, others sat still, not daring to move. The ballroom was like a ship without captain. She cut through the crowd and followed the clique. No one tried to stop her.

She found them huddled in a small, private study: Mr. Thompson was slumped in an armchair, clutching his head with both hands, Wesley Mouch was moaning, Eugene Lawson was sobbing with the sound of a nasty child’s rage, Jim was watching the others with an oddly expectant intensity. “I told you so!” Dr. Ferris was shouting. “I told you so, didn’t I? That’s where you get with your ‘peaceful persuasion’!”

She remained standing by the door. They seemed to notice her presence, but they did not seem to care.

“I resign!” yelled Chick Morrison. “I resign! I’m through! I don’t know what to say to the country! I can’t think! I won’t try! It’s no use!

I couldn’t help it! You’re not going to blame me! I’ve resigned!” He waved his arms in some shapeless gesture of futility or farewell, and ran out of the room, “He has a hide-out all stocked for himself in Tennessee,” said Tinky Holloway reflectively, as if he, too, had taken a similar precaution and were now wondering whether the time had come.

“He won’t keep it for long, if he gets there at all,” said Mouch. “With the gangs of raiders and the state of transportation—” He spread his hands and did not finish.

She knew what thoughts were filling the pause; she knew that no matter what private escapes these men had once provided for themselves, they were now grasping the fact that all of them were trapped.

She observed that there was no terror in their faces; she saw hints of it, but it looked like a perfunctory terror. Their expressions ranged from blank apathy to the relieved look of cheats who had believed that the game could end no other way and were making no effort to contest it or regret it—to the petulant blindness of Lawson, who refused to be conscious of anything—to the peculiar intensity of Jim, whose face suggested a secret smile.

“Well? Well?” Dr. Ferris was asking impatiently, with the crackling energy of a man who feels at home in a world of hysteria. “What are you now going to do with him? Argue? Debate? Make speeches?”

No one answered.

“He... has... to... save... us,” said Mouch slowly, as if straining the last of his mind into blankness and delivering an ultimatum to reality. “He has to... take over... and save the system.”

“Why don’t you write him a love letter about it?” said Ferris.

“We’ve got to... make him... take over... We’ve got to force him to rule,” said Mouch in the tone of a sleepwalker.

“Now,” said Ferris, suddenly dropping his voice, “do you see what a valuable establishment the State Science Institute really is?”

Mouch did not answer him, but she observed that they all seemed to know what he meant.

“You objected to that private research project of mine as ‘impractical,’” said Ferris softly. “But what did I tell you?”

Mouch did not answer; he was cracking his knuckles.

“This is no time for squeamishness,” James Taggart spoke up with unexpected vigor, but his voice, too, was oddly low. “We don’t have to be sissies about it.”

“It seems to me...” said Mouch dully, “that... that the end justifies the means...”

“It’s too late for any scruples or any principles,” said Ferris. “Only direct action can work now.”

No one answered; they were acting as if they wished that their pauses, not their words, would state what they were discussing.

“It won’t work,” said Tinky Holloway, “He won’t give in.”

“That’s what you think!” said Ferris, and chuckled, “You haven’t seen our experimental model in action. Last month, we got three confessions in three unsolved murder cases.”

“If...” started Mr. Thompson, and his voice cracked suddenly into a moan, “if he dies, we all perish!”

“Don’t worry,” said Ferris. “He won’t. The Ferris Persuader is safely calculated against that possibility.”

Mr. Thompson did not answer.

“It seems to me... that we have no other choice...” said Mouch; it was almost a whisper.

They remained silent; Mr. Thompson was struggling not to see that they were all looking at him. Then he cried suddenly, “Oh, do anything you want! I couldn’t help it! Do anything you want!”

Dr. Ferris turned to Lawson. “Gene,” he said tensely, still whispering, “run to the radio-control office. Order all stations to stand by. Tell them that I’ll have Mr. Galt on the air within three hours.”

Lawson leaped to his feet, with a sudden, mirthful grin, and ran out of the room.

She knew. She knew what they intended doing and what it was within them that made it possible. They did not think that this would succeed. They did not think that Galt would give in; they did not want him to give in. They did not think that anything could save them now; they did not want to be saved. Moved by the panic of their nameless emotions, they had fought against reality all their lives—and now they had reached a moment when at last they felt at home. They did not have to know why they felt it, they who had chosen never to know what they felt—they merely experienced a sense of recognition, since this was what they had been seeking, this was the kind of reality that had been implied in all of their feelings, their actions, their desires, their choices, their dreams. This was the nature and the method of the rebellion against existence and of the undefined quest for an unnamed Nirvana. They did not want to live; they wanted him to die.

The horror she felt was only a brief stab, like the wrench of a switching perspective: she grasped that the objects she had thought to be human were not. She was left with a sense of clarity, of a final answer and of the need to act. He was in danger; there was no time and no room in her consciousness to waste emotion on the actions of the subhuman.

“We must make sure,” Wesley Mouch was whispering, “that nobody ever learns about it...”

“Nobody will,” said Ferris; their voices had the cautious drone of conspirators. “It’s a secret, separate unit on the Institute grounds...

Sound-proofed and safely distant from the rest... Only a very few of our staff have ever entered it...”

“If we were to fly—” said Mouch, and stopped abruptly, as if he had caught some warning in Ferris’ face.

She saw Ferris’ eyes move to her, as if he had suddenly remembered her presence. She held his glance, letting him see the untroubled indifference of hers, as if she had neither cared nor understood. Then, as if merely grasping the signal of a private discussion, she turned slowly, with the suggestion of a shrug, and left the room. She knew that they were now past the stage of worrying about her.

She walked with the same unhurried indifference through the halls and through the exit of the hotel. But a block away, when she had turned a corner, her head flew up and the folds of her evening gown slammed like a sail against her legs with the sudden violence of the speed of her steps.

And now, as she rushed through the darkness, thinking only of finding a telephone booth, she felt a new sensation rising irresistibly within her, past the immediate tension of danger and concern: it was the sense of freedom of a world that had never had to be obstructed.

She saw the wedge of light on the sidewalk, that came from the window of a bar. No one gave her a second glance, as she crossed the half deserted room: the few customers were still waiting and whispering tensely in front of the crackling blue void of an empty television screen.

Standing in the tight space of the telephone booth, as in the cabin of a ship about to take off for a different planet, she dialed the number OR 6-5693.

The voice that answered at once was Francisco’s. “Hello?”

“Francisco?”

“Hello, Dagny. I was expecting you to call.”

“Did you hear the broadcast?”

“I did.”

“They are now planning to force him to give in.” She kept her voice to the tone of a factual report. “They intend to torture him. They have some machine called the Ferris Persuader, in an isolated unit on the grounds of the State Science Institute. It’s in New Hampshire. They mentioned flying. They mentioned that they would have him on the radio within three hours.”

“I see. Are you calling from a public phone booth?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still in evening clothes, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Now listen carefully. Go home, change your clothes, pack a few things you’ll need, take your jewelry and any valuables that you can carry, take some warm clothing. We won’t have time to do it later.

Meet me in forty minutes, on the northwest corner, two blocks east of the main entrance of the Taggart Terminal.”

“Right.”

“So long, Slug.”

“So long, Frisco.”

She was in the bedroom of her apartment, in less than five minutes, tearing off her evening gown. She left it lying in the middle of the floor, like the discarded uniform of an army she was not serving any longer. She put on a dark blue suit and—remembering Galt’s words—a white, high-collared sweater. She packed a suitcase and a bag with a strap that she could carry swung over her shoulder. She put her jewelry in a corner of the bag, including the bracelet of Rearden Metal she had earned in the outside world, and the five-dollar gold piece she had earned in the valley.

It was easy to leave the apartment and to lock the door, even though she knew she would probably never open it again. It seemed harder, for a moment, when she came to her office. No one had seen her come in; the anteroom of her office was empty; the great Taggart Building seemed unusually quiet. She stood looking for a moment at this room and at all the years it had contained. Then she smiled—no, it was not too hard, she thought; she opened her safe and took the documents she had come here to get. There was nothing else that she wanted to take from her office—except the picture of Nathaniel Taggart and the map of Taggart Transcontinental. She broke the two frames, folded the picture and the map, and slipped them into her suitcase.

She was locking the suitcase, when she heard the sound of hurrying steps. The door flew open and the chief engineer rushed in; he was shaking; his face was distorted.

“Miss Taggart!” he cried. “Oh, thank God, Miss Taggart, you’re here! We’ve been calling for you all over!”

She did not answer; she looked at him inquiringly.

“Miss Taggart, have you heard?”

“What?”

“Then you haven’t! Oh God, Miss Taggart, it’s... I can’t believe it, I still can’t believe it, but... Oh God, what are we going to do?

The... the Taggart Bridge is gone!”

She stared at him, unable to move.

“It’s gone! Blown up! Blown up, apparently, in one second! Nobody knows for certain what happened—but it looks like... they think that something went wrong at Project X and... it looks like those sound rays, Miss Taggart! We can’t get through to any point within a radius of a hundred miles! It’s not possible, it can’t be possible, but it looks as if everything in that circle has been wiped out!... We can’t get any answers! Nobody can get an answer—the newspapers, the radio stations, the police! We’re still checking, but the stories that are coming from the rim of that circle are—” He shuddered. “Only one thing is certain: the bridge is gone! Miss Taggart! We don’t know what to do!”

She leaped to her desk and seized the telephone receiver. Her hand stopped in mid-air. Then, slowly, twistedly, with the greatest effort ever demanded of her, she began to move her arm down to place the receiver back. It seemed to her that it took a long time, as if her arm had to move against some atmospheric pressure that no human body could combat—and in the span of these few brief moments, in the stillness of a blinding pain, she knew what Francisco had felt, that night, twelve years ago—and what a boy of twenty-six had felt when he had looked at his motor for the last time.

“Miss Taggart!” cried the chief engineer. “We don’t know what to do!”

The receiver clicked softly back into its cradle. “I don’t, either,” she answered.

In a moment, she knew it was over. She heard her voice telling the man to check further and report to her later—and she waited for the sound of his steps to vanish in the echoing silence of the hall.

Crossing the concourse of the Terminal for the last time, she glanced at the statue of Nathaniel Taggart—and remembered a promise she had made. It would be only a symbol now, she thought, but it would be the kind of farewell that Nathaniel Taggart deserved. She had no other writing instrument, so she took the lipstick from her bag and, smiling up at the marble face of the man who would have understood, she drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet.

She was first to reach the corner, two blocks east of the Terminal entrance. As she waited, she observed the first trickles of the panic that was soon to engulf the city: there were automobiles driving too fast, some of them loaded with household effects, there were too many police cars speeding by, and too many sirens bursting in the distance.

The news of the destruction of the Bridge was apparently spreading through the city; they would know that the city was doomed and they would start a stampede to escape—but they had no place to go, and it was not her concern any longer.

She saw Francisco’s figure approaching from some distance away; she recognized the swiftness of his walk, before she could distinguish the face under the cap pulled low over his eyes. She caught the moment when he saw her, as he came closer. He waved his arm, with a smile of greeting. Some conscious stress in the sweep of his arm made it the gesture of a d’Anconia, welcoming the arrival of a long-awaited traveler at the gates of his own domain.

When he approached, she stood solemnly straight and, looking at his face and at the buildings of the greatest city in the world, as at the kind of witnesses she wanted, she said slowly, her voice confident and steady: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

He inclined his head, as if in sign of admittance. His smile was now a salute.

Then he took her suitcase with one hand, her arm with the other, and said, “Come on.”

The unit known as “Project F”—in honor of its originator, Dr. Ferris—was a small structure of reinforced concrete, low on the slope of the hill that supported the State Science Institute on a higher, more public level. Only the small gray patch of the unit’s roof could be seen from the Institute’s windows, hidden in a jungle of ancient trees; it looked no bigger than the cover of a manhole.

The unit consisted of two stories in the shape of a small cube placed asymmetrically on top of a larger one. The first story had no windows, only a door studded with iron spikes; the second story had but one window, as if in reluctant concession to daylight, like a face with a single eye. The men on the staff of the Institute felt no curiosity about that structure and avoided the paths that led down to its door; nobody had ever suggested it, but they had the impression that the structure housed a project devoted to experiments with the germs of deadly diseases.

The two floors were occupied by laboratories that contained a great many cages with guinea pigs, dogs and rats. But the heart and meaning of the structure was a room in its cellar, deep under the ground; the room had been incompetently lined with the porous sheets of soundproofing material; the sheets had begun to crack and the naked rock of a cave showed through.

The unit was always protected by a squad of four special guards.

Tonight, the squad had been augmented to sixteen, summoned for emergency duty by a long-distance telephone call from New York. The guards, as well as all other employees of “Project F,” had been carefully chosen on the basis of a single qualification: an unlimited capacity for obedience.

The sixteen were stationed for the night outside the structure and in the deserted laboratories above the ground, where they remained uncritically on duty, with no curiosity about anything that might be taking place below.

In the cellar room, under the ground, Dr. Ferris, Wesley Mouch and James Taggart sat in armchairs lined up against one wall. A machine that looked like a small cabinet of irregular shape stood in a corner across from them. Its face bore rows of glass dials, each dial marked by a segment of red, a square screen that looked like an amplifier, rows of numbers, rows of wooden knobs and plastic buttons, a single lever controlling a switch at one side and a single red glass button at the other. The face of the machine seemed to have more expression than the face of the mechanic in charge of it; he was a husky young man in a sweat-stained shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows; his pale blue eyes were glazed by an enormously conscientious concentration on his task; he moved his lips once in a while, as if reciting a memorized lesson.

A short wire led from the machine to an electric storage battery behind it. Long coils of wire, like the twisted arms of an octopus, stretched forward across the stone floor, from the machine to a leather mattress spread under a cone of violent light. John Galt lay strapped to the mattress. He was naked; the small metal disks of electrodes at the ends of the wires were attached to his wrists, his shoulders, his hips and his ankles; a device resembling a stethoscope was attached to his chest and connected to the amplifier.

“Get this straight,” said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time. “We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand? We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give. What we want, we mean to get. Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won’t save you now. We want ideas—or else. We won’t let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you’ll take to save our system. Then we’ll have you tell it to the country over the radio.”

He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we’ll start. Do you understand?”

Galt was looking straight at them, his face expressionless, as if he understood too much. He did not answer.

They heard the sound of the stop-watch in the silence, counting off the seconds, and the sound of Mouch’s choked, irregular breathing as he gripped the arms of his chair.

Ferris waved a signal to the mechanic at the machine. The mechanic threw the switch; it lighted the red glass button and set off two sounds: one was the low, humming drone of an electric generator, the other was a peculiar beat, as regular as the ticking of a clock, but with an oddly muffled resonance. It took them a moment to realize that it came from the amplifier and that they were hearing the beat of Galt’s heart.

“Number three,” said Ferris, raising a finger in signal.

The mechanic pressed a button under one of the dials. A long shudder ran through Galt’s body; his left arm shook in jerking spasms, convulsed by the electric current that circled between his wrist and shoulder. His head fell back, his eyes closed, his lips drawn tight. He made no sound.

When the mechanic lifted his finger off the button, Galt’s arm stopped shaking. He did not move.

The three men glanced about them with an instant’s look of groping.

Ferris’ eyes were blank, Mouch’s terrified, Taggart’s disappointed. The sound of the thumping beat went on through the silence.

“Number two,” said Ferris. It was Galt’s right leg that twisted in convulsions, with the current now circling between his hip and ankle. His hands gripped the edges of the mattress. His head jerked once, from side to side, then lay still.

The beating of the heart grew faintly faster.

Mouch was drawing away, pressing against the back of his armchair. Taggart was sitting on the edge of his, leaning forward.

“Number one, gradual,” said Ferris.

Galt’s torso jerked upward and fell back and twisted in long shudders, straining against his strapped wrists—as the current was now running from his one wrist to the other, across his lungs. The mechanic was slowly turning a knob, increasing the voltage of the current; the needle on the dial was moving toward the red segment that marked danger. Galt’s breath was coming in broken, panting sounds out of convulsed lungs.

“Had enough?” snarled Ferris, when the current went off.

Galt did not answer. His lips moved faintly, opening for air. The beat from the stethoscope was racing. But his breath was falling to an even rhythm, by a controlled effort at relaxation.

“You’re too easy on him!” yelled Taggart, staring at the naked body on the mattress.

Galt opened his eyes and glanced at them for a moment. They could tell nothing, except that his glance was steady and fully conscious. Then he dropped his head again and lay still, as if he had forgotten them.

His naked body looked strangely out of place in this cellar. They knew it, though none of them would identify that knowledge. The long lines of his body, running from his ankles to the flat hips, to the angle of the waist, to the straight shoulders, looked like a statue of ancient Greece, sharing that statue’s meaning, but stylized to a longer, lighter, more active form and a gaunter strength, suggesting more restless an energy—the body, not of a chariot driver, but of a builder of airplanes. And as the meaning of a statue of ancient Greece—the statue of man as a god—clashed with the spirit of this century’s halls, so his body clashed with a cellar devoted to prehistorical activities. The clash was the greater, because he seemed to belong with electric wires, with stainless steel, with precision instruments, with the levers of a control board. Perhaps—this was the thought most fiercely resisted and most deeply buried at the bottom of his watchers sensations, the thought they knew only as a diffused hatred and an unfocused terror—perhaps it was the absence of such statues from the modern world that had transformed a generator into an octopus and brought a body such as his into its tentacles.

“I understand you’re some sort of electrical expert,” said Ferris, and chuckled. “So are we—don’t you think so?”

Two sounds answered him in the silence: the drone of the generator and the beating of Galt’s heart.

“The mixed series!” ordered Ferris, waving one finger at the mechanic.

The shocks now came at irregular, unpredictable intervals, one after another or minutes apart. Only the shuddering convulsions of Galt’s legs, arms, torso or entire body showed whether the current was racing between two particular electrodes or through all of them at once. The needles on the dials kept coming close to the red marks, then receding: the machine was calculated to inflict the maximum intensity of pain without damaging the body of the victim.

It was the watchers who found it unbearable to wait through the minutes of the pauses filled with the sound of the heartbeat: the heart was now racing in an irregular rhythm. The pauses were calculated to let that beat slow down, but allow no relief to the victim, who had to wait for a shock at any moment.

Galt lay relaxed, as if not attempting to fight the pain, but surrendering to it, not attempting to negate it, but to bear it. When his lips parted for breath and a sudden jolt slammed them tight again, he did not resist the shaking rigidity of his body, but he let it vanish the instant the current left him. Only the skin of his face was pulled tight, and the sealed line of his lips twisted sidewise once in a while. When a shock raced through his chest, the gold-copper strands of his hair flew with the jerking of his head, as if waving in a gust of wind, beating against his face, across his eyes. The watchers wondered why his hair seemed to be growing darker, until they realized that it was drenched in sweat.

The terror of hearing one’s own heart struggling as if about to burst at any moment, had been intended to be felt by the victim. It was the torturers who were trembling with terror, as they listened to the jagged, broken rhythm and missed a breath with every missing beat. It sounded now as if the heart were leaping, beating frantically against its cage of ribs, in agony and in a desperate anger. The heart was protesting; the man would not. He lay still, his eyes closed, his hands relaxed, hearing his heart as it fought for his life.

Wesley Mouch was first to break. “Oh God, Floyd!” he screamed.

“Don’t kill him! Don’t dare kill him! If he dies, we die!”

“He won’t,” snarled Ferris. “He’ll wish he did, but he won’t! The machine won’t let him! It’s mathematically computed! It’s safe!”

“Oh, isn’t it enough? He’ll obey us now! I’m sure he’ll obey!”

“No! It’s not enough! I don’t want him to obey! I want him to believe! To accept! To want to accept! We’ve got to have him work for us voluntarily!”

“Go ahead!” cried Taggart. “What are you waiting for? Can’t you make the current stronger? He hasn’t even screamed yet!”

“What’s the matter with you?” gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart’s face while a current was twisting Galt’s body: Taggart was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.

“Had enough?” Ferris kept yelling to Galt. “Are you ready to want what we want?”

They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them. There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.

In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language—and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: “We want you to take over!... We want you to rule!

... We order you to give orders!... We demand that you dictate!

... We order you to save us!... We order you to think!...”

They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.

The current was shooting through Galt’s chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling—when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped.

The silence was like a stunning blow, and before they had time to scream, their horror was topped by another: by the fact that Galt opened his eyes and raised his head.

Then they realized that the drone of the motor had ceased, too, and that the red light had gone out on the control panel: the current had stopped; the generator was dead.

The mechanic was jabbing his ringer at the button, to no avail. He yanked the lever of the switch again and again. He kicked the side of the machine. The red light would not go on; the sound did not return.

“Well?” snapped Ferris. “Well? What’s the matter?”

“The generator’s on the blink,” said the mechanic helplessly.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, find out and fix it!”

The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing any buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order. He put on his rubber gloves, picked up a pair of pliers, tightened a few bolts at random, and scratched his head.

“I don’t know,” he said; his voice had a sound of helpless docility.

“Who am I to know?”

The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs. They were acting merely by reflex: they knew that they did not know.

“But you’ve got to fix it!” yelled Ferris. “It’s got to work! We’ve got to have electricity!”

“We must continue!” cried Taggart; he was shaking, “It’s ridiculous!

I won’t have it! I won’t be interrupted! I won’t let him off!” He pointed in the direction of the mattress.

“Do something!” Ferris was crying to the mechanic. “Don’t just stand there! Do something! Fix it! I order you to fix it!”

“But I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” said the man, blinking.

“Then find out!”

“How am I to find out?”

“I order you to fix it! Do you hear me? Make it work—or I’ll fire you and throw you in jail!”

“But I don’t know what’s wrong with it.” The man sighed, bewildered. “I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s the vibrator that’s out of order,” said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. “Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You’ll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine—and your generator will work.”

There was a long moment of total silence.

The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt’s glance—and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes; it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery.

He made a step back. In the incoherent dimness of his consciousness, in some wordless, shapeless, unintelligible manner, even he suddenly grasped the meaning of what was occurring in that cellar.

He looked at Galt—he looked at the three men—he looked at the machine. He shuddered, he dropped his pliers and ran out of the room.

Galt burst out laughing.

The three men were backing slowly away from the machine. They were struggling not to allow themselves to understand what the mechanic had understood.

“No!” cried Taggart suddenly, glancing at Galt and leaping forward, “No! I won’t let him get away with it!” He fell down on his knees, groping frantically to find the aluminum cylinder of the vibrator.

“I’ll fix it! I’ll work it myself! We’ve got to go on! We’ve got to break him!”

“Take it easy, Jim,” said Ferris uneasily, jerking him up to his feet.

“Hadn’t we... hadn’t we better lay off for the night?” said Mouch pleadingly; he was looking at the door through which the mechanic had escaped, his glance part-envy, part-terror.

“No!” cried Taggart, “Jim, hasn’t he had enough? Don’t forget, we have to be careful.”

“No! He hasn’t had enough! He hasn’t even screamed yet!”

“Jim!” cried Mouch suddenly, terrified by something in Taggart’s face. “We can’t afford to kill him! You know it!”

“I don’t care! I want to break him! I want to hear him scream! I want—”

And then it was Taggart who screamed. It was a long, sudden, piercing scream, as if at some sudden sight, though his eyes were staring at space and seemed blankly sightless. The sight he was confronting was within him. The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment—the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing fully that his own death would follow.

He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was proof of Galt’s evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt’s destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt’s greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy—he was seeing it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, James Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt—he knew—he had sought the destruction of all existence.

It was not by means of words that this knowledge confronted his consciousness: as all his knowledge had consisted of emotions, so now he was held by an emotion and a vision that he had no power to dispel. He was no longer able to summon the fog to conceal the sight of all those blind alleys he had struggled never to be forced to see: now, at the end of every alley, he was seeing his hatred of existence—he was seeing the face of Cherryl Taggart with her joyous eagerness to live and that it was this particular eagerness he had always wanted to defeat—he was seeing his face as the face of a killer whom all men should rightfully loathe, who destroyed values for being values, who killed in order not to discover his own irredeemable evil.

“No...” he moaned, staring at that vision, shaking his head to escape it. “No... No... ”

“Yes,” said Galt.

He saw Galt’s eyes looking straight at his, as if Galt were seeing the things he was seeing.

“I told you that on the radio, didn’t I?” said Galt.

This was the stamp James Taggart had dreaded, from which there was no escape: the stamp and proof of objectivity. “No...” he said feebly once more, but it was no longer the voice of a living consciousness.

He stood for a moment, staring blindly at space, then his legs gave way, folding limply, and he sat on the floor, still staring, unaware of his action or surroundings.

“Jim... !” called Mouch. There was no answer.

Mouch and Ferris did not ask themselves or wonder what it was that had happened to Taggart: they knew that they must never attempt to discover it, under peril of sharing his fate. They knew who it was that had been broken tonight. They knew that this was the end of James Taggart, whether his physical body survived or not.

“Let’s... let’s get Jim out of here,” said Ferris shakily. “Let’s get him to a doctor... or somewhere...”

They pulled Taggart to his feet; he did not resist, he obeyed lethargically, and he moved his feet when pushed. It was he who had reached the state to which he had wanted Galt to be reduced. Holding his arms at both sides, his two friends led him out of the room.

He saved them from the necessity of admitting to themselves that they wanted to escape Galt’s eyes. Galt was watching them; his glance was too austerely perceptive.

“We’ll be back,” snapped Ferris to the chief of the guards. “Stay here and don’t let anyone in. Understand? No one.”

They pushed Taggart into their car, parked by the trees at the entrance. “We’ll be back.” said Ferris to no one in particular, to the trees and the darkness of the sky.

For the moment, their only certainty was that they had to escape from that cellar—the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.

CHAPTER X IN THE NAME OF THE BEST AMONG US

Dagny walked straight toward the guard who stood at the door of “Project F”. Her steps sounded pourposeful, even and open, rining in the silence of the path among the trees. She raised her head to a ra of moonlight, to let him recognize her face.

“Let me in,” she said.

“No admittance,” he answered in the voice of a robot. “By order or Dr. Ferris.”

“I am here by order of Mr. Thompson.”

“Huh?... I... I don’t know anything about that.”

“I do.”

“I mean, Dr. Ferris hasn’t told me... ma’am.”

“I am telling you.”

“But I’m not supposed to take any orders from anyone excepting Dr. Ferris.”

“Do you wish to disobey Mr. Thompson?”

“Oh, no, ma’am! But... but if Dr. Ferris said to let nobody in, that means nobody—” He added uncertainly and pleadingly, “—doesn’t it?”

“Do you know that my name is Dagny Taggart and that you’ve seen my pictures in the papers with Mr. Thompson and all the top leaders of the country?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then decide whether you wish to disobey their orders.”

“Oh, no, ma’am! I don’t!”

“Then let me in.”

“But I can’t disobey Dr. Ferris, either!”

“Then choose.”

“But I can’t choose ma’am! Who am I to choose?”

“You’ll have to.”

“Look,” he said hastily, pulling a key from his pocket and turning to the door, “I’ll ask the chief. He—”

“No.” she said.

Some quality in the tone of her voice made him whirl back to her: she was holding a gun pointed levelly at his heart.

“Listen carefully,” she said. “Either you let me in or I shoot you.

You may try to shoot me first, if you can. You have that choice—and no other. Now decide.”

His mouth fell open and the key dropped from his hand.

“Get out of my way,” she said.

He shook his head frantically, pressing his back against the door.

“Oh Christ, ma’am!” he gulped in the whine of a desperate plea. “I can’t shoot at you, seeing as you come from Mr. Thompson! And I can’t let you in against the word of Dr. Ferris! What am I to do? I’m only a little fellow! I’m only obeying orders! It’s not up to me!”

“It’s your life.” she said.

“If you let me ask the chief, he’ll tell me, he’ll—”

“I won’t let you ask anyone.”

“But how do I know that you really have an order from Mr. Thompson?”

“You don’t. Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I’m acting on my own—and you’ll be punished for obeying me. Maybe I have—and you’ll be thrown in jail for disobeying. Maybe Dr. Ferris and Mr. Thompson agree about this. Maybe they don’t—and you have to defy one or the other. These are the things you have to decide. There is no one to ask, no one to call, no one to tell you. You will have to decide them yourself.”

“But I can’t decide! Why me?”

“Because it’s your body that’s barring my way.”

“But I can’t decide! I’m not supposed to decide!”

“I’ll count to three,” she said. “Then I’ll shoot.”

“Wait! Wait! I haven’t said yes or no!” he cried, cringing tighter against the door, as if immobility of mind and body were his best protection, “One—” she counted; she could see his eyes staring at her in terror—“Two—” she could see that the gun held less terror for him than the alternative she offered—“Three.”

Calmly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness.

Her gun was equipped with a silencer; there was no sound to attract anyone’s attention, only the thud of a body falling at her feet.

She picked up the key from the ground—then waited for a few brief moments, as had been agreed upon.

Francisco was first to join her, coming from behind a corner of the building, then Hank Rearden, then Ragnar Danneskjold. There had been four guards posted at intervals among the trees, around the building. They were now disposed of: one was dead, three were left in the brush, bound and gagged.

She handed the key to Francisco without a word. He unlocked the door and went in, alone, leaving the door open to the width of an inch.

The three others waited outside, by that opening.

The hall was lighted by a single naked bulb stuck in the middle of the ceiling. A guard stood at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor.

“Who are you?” he cried at the sight of Francisco entering as if he owned the place. “Nobody’s supposed to come in here tonight!”

“I did,” said Francisco.

“Why did Rusty let you in?”

“He must have had his reasons.”

“He wasn’t supposed to!”

“Somebody has changed your suppositions.” Francisco’s eyes were taking a lightning inventory of the place. A second guard stood on the landing at the turn of the stairs, looking down at them and listening.

“What’s your business?”

“Copper-mining.”

“Huh? I mean, who are you?”

“The name’s too long to tell you. I’ll tell it to your chief. Where is he?”

“I’m asking the questions!” But he backed a step away. “Don’t... don’t you act like a big shot or I’ll—”

“Hey, Pete, he is!” cried the second guard, paralyzed by Francisco’s manner.

The first one was struggling to ignore it; his voice grew louder with the growth of his fear, as he snapped at Francisco, “What are you after?”

“I said I’ll tell it to your chief. Where is he?”

“I’m asking the questions!”

“I’m not answering them.”

“Oh, you’re not, are you?” snarled Pete, who had but one recourse when in doubt: his hand jerked to the gun on his hip.

Francisco’s hand was too fast for the two men to see its motion, and his gun was too silent. What they saw and heard next was the gun flying out of Pete’s hand, along with a splatter of blood from his shattered fingers, and his muffled howl of pain. He collapsed, groaning.

In the instant when the second guard grasped it, he saw that Francisco’s gun was aimed at him.

“Don’t shoot, mister!” he cried.

“Come down here with your hands up,” ordered Francisco, holding his gun aimed with one hand and waving a signal to the crack of the door with the other.

By the time the guard descended the stairs, Rearden was there to disarm him, and Danneskjold to tie his hands and feet. The sight of Dagny seemed to frighten him more than the rest; he could not understand it: the three men wore caps and windbreakers, and, but for their manner, could be taken for a gang of highwaymen; the presence of a lady was inexplicable.

“Now,” said Francisco, “where is your chief?”

The guard jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. “Up there.”

“How many guards are there in the building?”

“Nine.”

“Where are they?”

“One’s on the cellar stairs. The others are all up there.”

“Where?”

“In the big laboratory. The one with the window.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“What are these rooms?” He pointed at the doors leading off the hall.

“They’re labs, too. They’re locked for the night.”

“Who’s got the key?”

“Him.” He jerked his head at Pete.

Rearden and Danneskjold took the key from Pete’s pocket and hurried soundlessly to check the rooms, while Francisco continued, “Are there any other men in the building?”

“No.”

“Isn’t there a prisoner here?”

“Oh... yeah, I guess so. There must be, or they wouldn’t’ve kept us all on duty.”

“Is he still here?”

“That, I don’t know. They’d never tell us.”

“Is Dr. Ferris here?”

“No. He left ten-fifteen minutes ago.”

“Now, that laboratory upstairs—does it open right on the stair landing?”

“Yes.”

“How many doors are there?”

“Three. It’s the one in the middle.”

“What are the other rooms?”

“There’s the small laboratory on one side and Dr. Ferris’ office on the other.”

“Are there connecting doors between them?”

“Yes.”

Francisco was turning to his companions, when the guard said pleadingly, “Mister, can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Who are you?”

He answered in the solemn tone of a drawing-room introduction, “Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia.”

He left the guard gaping at him and turned to a brief, whispered consultation with his companions.

In a moment, it was Rearden who went up the stairs—swiftly, soundlessly and alone.

Cages containing rats and guinea pigs were stacked against the walls of the laboratory; they had been put there by the guards who were playing poker on the long laboratory table in the center. Six of them were playing; two were standing in opposite corners, watching the entrance door, guns in hand. It was Rearden’s face that saved him from being shot on sight when he entered: his face was too well known to them and too unexpected. He saw eight heads staring at him with recognition and with inability to believe what they were recognizing.

He stood at the door, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, with the casual, confident manner of a business executive.

“Who is in charge here?” he asked in the politely abrupt voice of a man who does not waste time.

“You... you’re not...” stammered a lanky, surly individual at the card table.

“I’m Hank Rearden. Are you the chief?”

“Yeah! But where in blazes do you come from?”

“From New York.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Then, I take it, you have not been notified.”

“Should I have... I mean, about what?” The swift, touchy, resentful suspicion that his superiors had slighted his authority, was obvious in the chief’s voice. He was a tall, emaciated man, with jerky movements, a sallow face and the restless, unfocused eyes of a drug addict.

“About my business here.”

“You... you can’t have any business here,” he snapped, torn between the fear of a bluff and the fear of having been left out of some important, top-level decision. “Aren’t you a traitor and a deserter and a—”

“I see that you’re behind the times, my good man.”

The seven others in the room were staring at Rearden with an awed, superstitious uncertainty. The two who held guns still held them aimed at him in the impassive manner of automatons. He did not seem to take notice of them.

“What is it you say is your business here?” snapped the chief.

“I am here to take charge of the prisoner whom you are to deliver to me.”

“If you came from headquarters, you’d know that I’m not supposed to know anything about any prisoner—and that nobody is to touch him!”

“Except me.”

The chief leaped to his feet, darted to a telephone and seized the receiver. He had not raised it halfway to his ear when he dropped it abruptly with a gesture that sent a vibration of panic through the room: he had had time to hear that the telephone was dead and to know that the wires were cut.

His look of accusation, as he whirled to Rearden, broke against the faintly contemptuous reproof of Rearden’s voice: “That’s no way to guard a building—if this is what you allowed to happen. Better let me have the prisoner, before anything happens to him—if you don’t want me to report you for negligence, as well as insubordination.”

The chief dropped heavily back on his chair, slumped forward across the table and looked up at Rearden with a glance that made his emaciated face resemble the animals that were beginning to stir in the cages.

“Who is the prisoner?” he asked.

“My good man,” said Rearden, “if your immediate superiors did not see fit to tell you, I certainly will not.”

“They didn’t see fit to tell me about your coming here, either!” yelled the chief, his voice confessing the helplessness of anger and broadcasting the vibrations of impotence to his men. “How do I know you’re on the level? With the phone out of order, who’s going to tell me? How am I to know what to do?”

“That’s your problem, not mine.”

“I don’t believe you!” His cry was too shrill to project conviction, “I don’t believe that the government would send you on a mission, when you’re one of those vanishing traitors and friends of John Galt who—”

“But haven’t you heard?”

“What?”

“John Galt has made a deal with the government and has brought us all back.”

“Oh, thank God!” cried one of the guards, the youngest.

“Shut your mouth! You’re not to have any political opinions!” snapped the chief, and jerked back to Rearden. “Why hasn’t it been announced on the radio?”

“Do you presume to hold opinions on when and how the government should choose to announce its policies?”

In the long moment of silence, they could hear the rustle of the animals clawing at the bars of their cages.

“I think I should remind you,” said Rearden, “that your job is not to question orders, but to obey them, that you are not to know or understand the policies of your superiors, that you are not to judge, to choose or to doubt.”

“But I don’t know whether I’m supposed to obey you!”

“If you refuse, you’ll take the consequences.”

Crouching against the table, the chief moved his glance slowly, appraisingly, from Rearden’s face to the two gunmen in the corners. The gunmen steadied their aim by an almost imperceptible movement. A nervous rustle went through the room. An animal squeaked shrilly in one of the cages.

“I think I should also tell you,” said Rearden, his voice faintly harder, “that I am not alone. My friends are waiting outside.”

“Where?”

“All around this room.”

“How many?”

“You’ll find out—one way or the other.”

“Say, Chief,” moaned a shaky voice from among the guards, “we don’t want to tangle with those people, they’re—”

“Shut up!” roared the chief, leaping to his feet and brandishing his gun in the direction of the speaker. “You’re not going to turn yellow on me, any of you bastards!” He was screaming to ward off the knowledge that they had. He was swaying on the edge of panic, fighting against the realization that something somehow had disarmed his men. “There’s nothing to be scared of!” He was screaming it to himself, struggling to recapture the safety of his only sphere: the sphere of violence. “Nothing and nobody! I’ll show you!” He whirled around, his hand shaking at the end of his sweeping arm, and fired at Rearden.

Some of them saw Rearden sway, his right hand gripping his left shoulder. Others, in the same instant, saw the gun drop out of the chief’s hand and hit the floor in time with his scream and with the spurt of blood from his wrist. Then all of them saw Francisco d’Anconia standing at the door on the left, his soundless gun still aimed at the chief.

All of them were on their feet and had drawn their guns, but they lost that first moment, not daring to fire.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” said Francisco.

“Jesus!” gasped one of the guards, struggling for the memory of a name he could not recapture. “That’s... that’s the guy who blew up all the copper mines in the world!”

“It is,” said Rearden.

They had been backing involuntarily away from Francisco—and turned to see that Rearden still stood at the entrance door, with a pointed gun in his right hand and a dark stain spreading on his left shoulder.

“Shoot, you bastards!” screamed the chief to the wavering men.

“What are you waiting for? Shoot them down!” He was leaning with one arm against the table, blood running out of the other. “I’ll report any man who doesn’t fight! I’ll have him sentenced to death for it!”

“Drop your guns,” said Rearden.

The seven guards stood frozen for an instant, obeying neither.

“Let me out of here!” screamed the youngest, dashing for the door on the right.

He threw the door open and sprang back: Dagny Taggart stood on the threshold, gun in hand.

The guards were drawing slowly to the center of the room, fighting an invisible battle in the fog of their minds, disarmed by a sense of unreality in the presence of the legendary figures they had never expected to see, feeling almost as if they were ordered to fire at ghosts.

“Drop your guns,” said Rearden. “You don’t know why you’re here.

We do. You don’t know who your prisoner is. We do. You don’t know why your bosses want you to guard him. We know why we want to get him out. You don’t know the purpose of your fight. We know the purpose of ours. If you die, you won’t know what you’re dying for. If we do, we will.”

“Don’t... don’t listen to him!” snarled the chief. “Shoot! I order you to shoot!”

One of the guards looked at the chief, dropped his gun and, raising his arms, backed away from the group toward Rearden.

“God damn you!” yelled the chief, seized a gun with his left hand and fired at the deserter.

In time with the fall of the man’s body, the window burst into a shower of glass—and from the limb of a tree, as from a catapult, the tall, slender figure of a man flew into the room, landed on its feet and fired at the first guard in reach.

“Who are you?”, screamed some terror-blinded voice.

“Ragnar Danneskjold.”

Three sounds answered him: a long, swelling moan of panic—the clatter of four guns dropped to the floor—and the bark of the fifth, fired by a guard at the forehead of the chief.

By the time the four survivors of the garrison began to reassemble the pieces of their consciousness, their figures were stretched on the floor, bound and gagged; the fifth one was left standing, his hands tied behind his back.

“Where is the prisoner?” Francisco asked him.

“In the cellar... I guess.”

“Who has the key?”

“Dr. Ferris.”

“Where are the stairs to the cellar?”

“Behind a door in Dr. Ferris’ office.”

“Lead the way.”

As they started, Francisco turned to Rearden. “Are you all right, Hank?”

“Sure.”

“Need to rest?”

“Hell, no!”

From the threshold of a door in Ferris’ office, they looked down a steep flight of stone stairs and saw a guard on the landing below.

“Come here with your hands up!” ordered Francisco.

The guard saw the silhouette of a resolute stranger and the glint of a gun: It was enough. He obeyed immediately; he seemed relieved to escape from the damp stone crypt. He was left tied on the floor of the office, along with the guard who had led them.

Then the four rescuers were free to fly down the stairs to the locked steel door at the bottom. They had acted and moved with the precision of a controlled discipline. Now, it was as if their inner reins had broken.

Danneskjold had the tools to smash the lock. Francisco was first to enter the cellar, and his arm barred Dagny’s way for the fraction of a second—for the length of a look to make certain that the sight was bearable—then he let her rush past him: beyond the tangle of electric wires, he had seen Galt’s lifted head and glance of greeting.

She fell down on her knees by the side of the mattress. Galt looked up at her, as he had looked on their first morning in the valley, his smile was like the sound of a laughter that had never been touched by pain, his voice was soft and low: “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?”

Tears running down her face, but her smile declaring a full, confident, radiant certainty, she answered, “No, we never had to.”

Rearden and Danneskjold were cutting his bonds. Francisco held a flask of brandy to Galt’s lips. Galt drank, and raised himself to lean on an elbow when his arms were free. “Give me a cigarette,” he said.

Francisco produced a package of dollar-sign cigarettes. Galt’s hand shook a little, as he held a cigarette to the flame of a lighter, but Francisco’s hand shook much more.

Glancing at his eyes over the flame, Galt smiled and said in the tone of an answer to the questions Francisco was not asking, “Yes, it was pretty bad, but bearable—and the kind of voltage they used leaves no damage.”

“I’ll find them some day, whoever they were...” said Francisco; the tone of his voice, flat, dead and barely audible, said the rest.

“If you do, you’ll find that there’s nothing left of them to kill.”

Galt glanced at the faces around him; he saw the intensity of the relief in their eyes and the violence of the anger in the grimness of their features; he knew in what manner they were now reliving his torture.

“It’s over,” he said. “Don’t make it worse for yourself than it was for me.”

Francisco turned his face away. “It’s only that it was you...” he whispered, “you... if it were anyone but you...”

“But it had to be me, if they were to try their last, and they’ve tried, and”—he moved his hand, sweeping the room—and the meaning of those who had made it—into the wastelands of the past—“and that’s that.”

Francisco nodded, his face still turned away; the violent grip of his fingers clutching Galt’s wrist for a moment was his answer.

Galt lifted himself to a sitting posture, slowly regaining control of his muscles. He glanced up at Dagny’s face, as her arm shot forward to help him; he saw the struggle of her smile against the tension of her resisted tears; it was the struggle of her knowledge that nothing could matter beside the sight of his naked body and that this body was living—against her knowledge of what it had endured. Holding her glance, he raised his hand and touched the collar of her white sweater with his fingertips, in acknowledgment and in reminder of the only things that were to matter from now on. The faint tremor of her lips, relaxing into a smile, told him that she understood.

Danneskjold found Galt’s shirt, slacks and the rest of his clothing, which had been thrown on the floor in a corner of the room. “Do you think you can walk, John?” he asked.

“Sure.”

While Francisco and Rearden were helping Galt to dress, Danneskjold proceeded calmly, systematically, with no visible emotion, to demolish the torture machine into splinters.

Galt was not fully steady on his feet, but he could stand, leaning on Francisco’s shoulder. The first few steps were hard, but by the time they reached the door, he was able to resume the motions of walking.

His one arm encircled Francisco’s shoulders for support; his other arm held Dagny’s shoulders, both to gain support and to give it.

They did not speak as they walked down the hill, with the darkness of the trees closing in about them for protection, cutting off the dead glow of the moon and the deader glow in the distance behind them, in the windows of the State Science Institute.

Francisco’s airplane was hidden in the brush, on the edge of a meadow beyond the next hill. There were no human habitations for miles around them. There were no eyes to notice or to question the sudden streaks of the airplane’s headlights shooting across the desolation of dead weeds, and the violent burst of the motor brought to life by Danneskjold, who took the wheel.

With the sound of the door slamming shut behind them and the forward thrust of the wheels under their feet, Francisco smiled for the first time.

“This is my one and only chance to give you orders,” he said, helping Galt to stretch out in a reclining chair. “Now lie still, relax and take it easy... You, too,” he added, turning to Dagny and pointing at the seat by Galt’s side.

The wheels were running faster, as if gaining speed and purpose and lightness, ignoring the impotent obstacles of small jolts from the ruts of the ground. When the motion turned to a long, smooth streak, when they saw the dark shapes of the trees sweeping down and dropping past their windows, Galt leaned silently over and pressed his lips to Dagny’s hand: he was leaving the outer world with the one value he had wanted to win from it.

Francisco had produced a first-aid kit and was removing Rearden’s shirt to bandage his wound. Galt saw the thin red trickle running from Rearden’s shoulder down his chest.

“Thank you, Hank,” he said.

Rearden smiled. “I will repeat what you said when I thanked you, on our first meeting: ‘If you understand that I acted for my own sake, you know that no gratitude is required.’”

“I will repeat,” said Galt, “the answer you gave me: ‘That is why I thank you.’”

Dagny noticed that they looked at each other as if their glance were the handshake of a bond too firm to require any statement. Rearden saw her watching them—and the faintest contraction of his eyes was like a smile of sanction, as if his glance were repeating to her the message he had sent her from the valley.

They heard the sudden sound of Danneskjold’s voice raised cheerfully in conversation with empty space, and they realized that he was speaking over the plane’s radio: “Yes, safe and sound, all of us...

Yes, he’s unhurt, just shaken a little, and resting... No, no permanent injury... Yes, we’re all here. Hank Rearden got a flesh wound, but”—he glanced over his shoulder—“but he’s grinning at me right now... Losses? I think we lost our temper for a few minutes back there, but we’re recovering... Don’t try to beat me to Galt’s Gulch, I’ll land first—and I’ll help Kay in the restaurant to fix your breakfast.”

“Can any outsiders hear him?” asked Dagny.

“No,” said Francisco. “It’s a frequency they’re not equipped to get.”

“Whom is he talking to?” asked Galt.

“To about half the male population of the valley,” said Francisco, “or as many as we had space for on every plane available. They are flying behind us right now. Did you think any of them would stay home and leave you in the hands of the looters? We were prepared to get you by open, armed assault on that Institute or on the Wayne-Falkland, if necessary. But we knew that in such case we would run the risk of their killing you when they saw that they were beaten. That’s why we decided that the four of us would first try it alone. Had we failed, the others would have proceeded with an open attack. They were waiting, half a mile away. We had men posted among the trees on the hill, who saw us get out and relayed the word to the others. Ellis Wyatt was in charge. Incidentally, he’s flying your plane. The reason we couldn’t get to New Hampshire as fast as Dr. Ferris, is that we had to get our planes from distant, hidden landing places, while he had the advantage of open airports. Which, incidentally, he won’t have much longer.”

“No,” said Galt, “not much longer.”

“That was our only obstacle. The rest was easy. I’ll tell you the whole story later. Anyway, the four of us were all that was necessary to beat their garrison.”

“One of these centuries,” said Danneskjold, turning to them for a moment, “the brutes, private or public, who believe that they can rule their betters by force, will learn the lesson of what happens when brute force encounters mind and force.”

“They’ve learned it,” said Galt. “Isn’t that the particular lesson you have been teaching them for twelve years?”

“I? Yes. But the semester is over. Tonight was the last act of violence that I’ll ever have to perform. It was my reward for the twelve years.

My men have now started to build their homes in the valley. My ship is hidden where no one will find her, until I’m able to sell her for a much more civilized use. She’ll be converted into a transatlantic passenger liner—an excellent one, even if of modest size. As for me, I will start getting ready to give a different course of lessons. I think I’ll have to brush up on the works of our teacher’s first teacher.”

Rearden chuckled. “I’d like to be present at your first lecture on philosophy in a university classroom,” he said. “I’d like to see how your students will be able to keep their mind on the subject and how you’ll answer the sort of irrelevant questions I won’t blame them for wanting to ask you.”

“I will tell them that they’ll find the answers in the subject.”

There were not many lights on the earth below. The countryside was an empty black sheet, with a few occasional flickers in the windows of some government structures, and the trembling glow of candles in the windows of thriftless homes. Most of the rural population had long since been reduced to the life of those ages when artificial light was an exorbitant luxury, and a sunset put an end to human activity. The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls and power-conservation rules.

But when the place that had once been the source of the tide—New York City—rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its lights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness, almost as if, in an ultimate effort, in a final appeal for help, it were now stretching its arms to the plane that was crossing its sky. Involuntarily, they sat up, as if at respectful attention at the deathbed of what had been greatness.

Looking down, they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane. The news of the continent’s severed artery had now engulfed the city, men were deserting their posts, trying, in panic, to abandon New York, seeking escape where all roads were cut off and escape was no longer possible.

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations—and that the lights of New York had gone out.

Dagny gasped. “Don’t look down!” Galt ordered sharply.

She raised her eyes to his face. His face had that look of austerity with which she had always seen him meet facts.

She remembered the story Francisco had told her: “He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood.

He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city.

He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.”

She thought of it when she saw the three of them—John Galt, Francisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold—look silently at one another for a moment.

She glanced at Rearden; he was not looking down, he was looking ahead, as she had seen him look at an untouched countryside: with a glance appraising the possibilities of action.

When she looked at the darkness ahead, another memory rose in her mind—the moment when, circling above the Afton airport, she had seen the silver body of a plane rise like a phoenix from the darkness of the earth. She knew that now, at this hour, their plane was carrying all that was left of New York City.

She looked ahead. The earth would be as empty as the space where their propeller was cutting an unobstructed path—as empty and as free.

She knew what Nat Taggart had felt at his start and why now, for the first time, she was following him in full loyalty: the confident sense of facing a void and of knowing that one has a continent to build.

She felt the whole struggle of her past rising before her and dropping away, leaving her here, on the height of this moment. She smiled—and the words in her mind, appraising and sealing the past, were the words of courage, pride and dedication, which most men had never understood, the words of a businessman’s language: “Price no object.”

She did not gasp and she felt no tremor when, in the darkness below, she saw a small string of lighted dots struggling slowly westward through the void, with the long, bright dash of a headlight groping to protect the safety of its way; she felt nothing, even though it was a train and she knew that it had no destination but the void.

She turned to Galt. He was watching her face, as if he had been following her thoughts. She saw the reflection of her smile in his. “It’s the end,” she said. “It’s the beginning,” he answered.

Then they lay still, leaning back in their chairs, silently looking at each other. Then their persons filled each other’s awareness, as the sum and meaning of the future—but the sum included the knowledge of all that had had to be earned, before the person of another being could come to embody the value of one’s existence.

New York was far behind them, when they heard Danneskjold answer a call from the radio: “Yes, he’s awake. I don’t think he’ll sleep tonight... Yes, I think he can.” He turned to glance over his shoulder. “John, Dr. Akston would like to speak to you.”

“What? Is he on one of those planes behind us?”

“Certainly.”

Galt leaped forward to seize the microphone. “Hello, Dr. Akston,” he said; the quiet, low tone of his voice was the audible image of a smile transmitted through space.

“Hello, John.” The too-conscious steadiness of Hugh Akston’s voice confessed at what cost he had waited to learn whether he would ever pronounce these two words again. “I just wanted to hear your voice... just to know that you’re all right.”

Galt chuckled and—in the tone of a student proudly presenting a completed task of homework as proof of a lesson well learned—he answered, “Of course I am all right, Professor. I had to be. A is A.”

The locomotive of the eastbound Comet broke down in the middle of a desert in Arizona. It stopped abruptly, for no visible reason, like a man who had not permitted himself to know that he was bearing too much: some overstrained connection snapped for good.

When Eddie Willers called for the conductor, he waited a long time before the man came in, and he sensed the answer to his question by the look of resignation on the man’s face.

“The engineer is trying to find out what’s wrong, Mr. Willers,” he answered softly, in a tone implying that it was his duty to hope, but that he had held no hope for years.

“He doesn’t know?”

“He’s working on it.” The conductor waited for a polite half-minute and turned to go, but stopped to volunteer an explanation, as if some dim, rational habit told him that any attempt to explain made any unadmitted terror easier to bear. “Those Diesels of ours aren’t fit to be sent out on the road, Mr. Willers. They weren’t worth repairing long ago.”

“I know,” said Eddie Willers quietly.

The conductor sensed that his explanation was worse than none: it led to questions that men did not ask these days. He shook his head and went out.

Eddie Willers sat looking at the empty darkness beyond the window.

This was the first eastbound Cornet out of San Francisco in many days: she was the child of his tortured effort to re-establish transcontinental service. He could not tell what the past few days had cost him or what he had done to save the San Francisco terminal from the blind chaos of a civil war that men were fighting with no concept of their goals; there was no way to remember the deals he had made on the basis of the range of every shifting moment. He knew only that he had obtained immunity for the terminal from the leaders of three different warring factions; that he had found a man for the post of terminal manager who did not seem to have given up altogether; that he had started one more Taggart Comet on her eastward run, with the best Diesel engine and the best crew available; and that he had boarded her for his return journey to New York, with no knowledge of how long his achievement would last.

He had never had to work so hard; he had done his job as conscientiously well as he had always done any assignment; but it was as if he had worked in a vacuum, as if his energy had found no transmitters and had run into the sands of... of some such desert as the one beyond the window of the Comet. He shuddered: he felt a moment’s kinship with the stalled engine of the train.

After a while, he summoned the conductor once more. “How is it going?” he asked.

The conductor shrugged and shook his head.

“Send the fireman to a track phone. Have him tell the Division Headquarters to send us the best mechanic available.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was nothing to see beyond the window; turning off the light, Eddie Willers could distinguish a gray spread dotted by the black spots of cacti, with no start to it and no end. He wondered how men had ever ventured to cross it, and at what price, in the days when there were no trains. He jerked his head away and snapped on the light.

It was only the fact that the Comet was in exile, he thought, mat gave him this sense of pressing anxiety. She was stalled on an alien rail—on the borrowed track of the Atlantic Southern that ran through Arizona, the track they were using without payment. He had to get her out of here, he thought; he would not feel like this once they returned to their own rail. But the junction suddenly seemed an insurmountable distance away: on the shore of the Mississippi, at the Taggart Bridge.

No, he thought, that was not all. He had to admit to himself what images were nagging him with a sense of uneasiness he could neither grasp nor dispel; they were too meaningless to define and too inexplicable to dismiss. One was the image of a way station they had passed without stopping, more than two hours ago: he had noticed the empty platform and the brightly lighted windows of the small station building; the lights came from empty rooms; he had seen no single human figure, neither in the building nor on the tracks outside. The other image was of the next way station they had passed: its platform was jammed with an agitated mob. Now they were far beyond the reach of the light or sound of any station.

He had to get the Comet out of here, he thought. He wondered why he felt it with such urgency and why it had seemed so crucially important to re-establish the Comet’s run. A mere handful of passengers was rattling in her empty cars; men had no place to go and no goals to reach. It was not for their sake that he had struggled; he could not say for whose. Two phrases stood as the answer in his mind, driving him with the vagueness of a prayer and the scalding force of an absolute.

One was: From Ocean to Ocean, forever—the other was: Don’t let it go!...

The conductor returned an hour later, with the fireman, whose face looked oddly grim.

“Mr. Willers,” said the fireman slowly, “Division Headquarters does not answer.”

Eddie Willers sat up, his mind refusing to believe it, yet knowing suddenly that for some inexplicable reason this was what he had expected. “It’s impossible!” he said, his voice low; the fireman was looking at him, not moving. “The track phone must have been out of order.”

“No, Mr. Willers. It was not out of order. The line was alive all right.

The Division Headquarters wasn’t. I mean, there was no one there to answer, or else no one who cared to.”

“But you know that that’s impossible!”

The fireman shrugged; men did not consider any disaster impossible these days.

Eddie Willers leaped to his feet. “Go down the length of the train,” he ordered the conductor. “Knock on all the doors—the occupied ones, that is—and see whether there’s an electrical engineer aboard.”

“Yes, sir.”

Eddie knew that they felt, as he felt it, that they would find no such man; not among the lethargic, extinguished faces of the passengers they had seen. “Come on,” he ordered, turning to the fireman.

They climbed together aboard the locomotive. The gray-haired engineer was sitting in his chair, staring out at the cacti. The engine’s headlight had stayed on and it stretched out into the night, motionless and straight, reaching nothing but the dissolving blur of crossties.

“Let’s try to find what’s wrong,” said Eddie, removing his coat, his voice half-order, half-plea. “Let’s try some more.”

“Yes, sir,” said the engineer, without resentment or hope.

The engineer had exhausted his meager store of knowledge; he had checked every source of trouble he could think of. He went crawling over and under the machinery, unscrewing its parts and screwing them back again, taking out pieces and replacing them, dismembering the motors at random, like a child taking a clock apart, but without the child’s conviction that knowledge is possible.

The fireman kept leaning out of the cab’s window, glancing at the black stillness and shivering, as if from the night air that was growing colder.

“Don’t worry,” said Eddie Willers, assuming a tone of confidence.

“We’ve got to do our best, but if we fail, they’ll send us help sooner or later. They don’t abandon trains in the middle of nowhere.”

“They didn’t used to,” said the fireman.

Once in a while, the engineer raised his grease-smeared face to look at the grease-smeared face and shirt of Eddie Willers. “What’s the use, Mr. Willers?” he asked.

“We can’t let it go!” Eddie answered fiercely; he knew dimly that what he meant was more than the Comet... and more than the railroad.

Moving from the cab through the three motor units and back to the cab again, his hands bleeding, his shirt sticking to his back, Eddie Willers was struggling to remember everything he had ever known about engines, anything he had learned in college, and earlier: anything he had picked up in those days when the station agents at Rockdale Station used to chase him off the rungs of their lumbering switch engines.

The pieces connected to nothing; his brain seemed jammed and tight; he knew that motors were not his profession, he knew that he did not know and that it was now a matter of life or death for him to discover the knowledge. He was looking at the cylinders, the blades, the wires, the control panels still winking with lights. He was struggling not to allow into his mind the thought that was pressing against its periphery: What were the chances and how long would it take—according to the mathematical theory of probability—for primitive men, working by rule-of-thumb, to hit the right combination of parts and re-create the motor of this engine?

“What’s the use, Mr. Willers?” moaned the engineer.

“We can’t let it go!” he cried.

He did not know how many hours had passed when he heard the fireman shout suddenly, “Mr. Willers! Look!”

The fireman was leaning out the window, pointing into the darkness behind them.

Eddie Willers looked. An odd little light was swinging jerkily far in the distance; it seemed to be advancing at an imperceptible rate; it did not look like any sort of light he could identify.

After a while, it seemed to him that he distinguished some large black shapes advancing slowly; they were moving in a line parallel with the track; the spot of light hung low over the ground, swinging; he strained his ears, but heard nothing.

Then he caught a feeble, muffled beat that sounded like the hoofs of horses. The two men beside him were watching the black shapes with a look of growing terror, as if some supernatural apparition were advancing upon them out of the desert night. In the moment when they chuckled suddenly, joyously, recognizing the shapes, it was Eddie’s face that froze into a look of terror at the sight of a ghost more frightening than any they could have expected: it was a train of covered wagons.

The swinging lantern jerked to a stop by the side of the engine. “Hey, bud, can I give you a lift?” called a man who seemed to be the leader; he was chuckling. “Stuck, aren’t you?”

The passengers of the Comet were peering out of the windows; some were descending the steps and approaching. Women’s faces peeked from the wagons, from among the piles of household goods; a baby wailed somewhere at the rear of the caravan.

“Are you crazy?” asked Eddie Willers.

“No, I mean it, brother. We got plenty of room. We’ll give you folks a lift—for a price—if you want to get out of here.” He was a lanky, nervous man, with loose gestures and an insolent voice, who looked like a side-show barker.

“This is the Taggart Comet,” said Eddie Willers, choking.

“The Comet, eh? Looks more like a dead caterpillar to me. What’s the matter, brother? You’re not going anywhere—and you can’t get there any more, even if you tried.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t think you’re going to New York, do you?”

“We are going to New York.”

“Then... then you haven’t heard?”

“What?”

“Say, when was the last time you spoke to any of your stations?”

“I don’t know!... Heard what?”

“That your Taggart Bridge is gone. Gone. Blasted to bits. Sound-ray explosion or something. Nobody knows exactly. Only there ain’t any bridge any more to cross the Mississippi. There ain’t any New York any more—leastways, not for folks like you and me to reach.”

Eddie Willers did not know what happened next; he had fallen back against the side of the engineer’s chair, staring at the open door of the motor unit; he did not know how long he stayed there, but when, at last, he turned his head, he saw that he was alone. The engineer and the fireman had left the cab. There was a scramble of voices outside, screams, sobs, shouted questions and the sound of the side-show barker’s laughter.

Eddie pulled himself to the window of the cab: the Comet’s passengers and crew were crowding around the leader of the caravan and his semi-ragged companions; he was waving his loose arms in gestures of command. Some of the better-dressed ladies from the Comet—whose husbands had apparently been first to make a deal—were climbing aboard the covered wagons, sobbing and clutching their delicate makeup cases.

“Step right up, folks, step right up!” the barker was yelling cheerfully.

“We’ll make room for everybody! A bit crowded, but moving—better than being left here for coyote fodder! The day of the iron horse is past! All we got is plain, old-fashioned horse! Slow, but sure!”

Eddie Willers climbed halfway down the ladder on the side of the engine, to see the crowd and to be heard. He waved one arm, hanging onto the rungs with the other. “You’re not going, are you?” he cried to his passengers. “You’re not abandoning the Comet?”

They drew a little away from him, as if they did not want to look at him or answer. They did not want to hear questions their minds were incapable of weighing. He saw the blind faces of panic.

“What’s the matter with the grease-monkey?” asked the barker, pointing at Eddie.

“Mr. Willers,” said the conductor softly, “it’s no use...”

“Don’t abandon the Comet!” cried Eddie Willers. “Don’t let it go! Oh God, don’t let it go!”

“Are you crazy?” cried the barker. “You’ve no idea what’s going on at your railroad stations and headquarters! They’re running around like a pack of chickens with their heads cut off! I don’t think there’s going to be a railroad left in business this side of the Mississippi, by tomorrow morning!”

“Better come along, Mr. Willers,” said the conductor.

“No!” cried Eddie, clutching the metal rung as if he wanted his hand to grow fast to it.

The barker shrugged. “Well, it’s your funeral!”

“Which way are you going?” asked the engineer, not looking at Eddie.

“Just going, brother! Just looking for some place to stop... somewhere. We’re from Imperial Valley, California. The ‘People’s Party’ crowd grabbed the crops and any food we had in the cellars. Hoarding, they called it. So we just picked up and went. Got to travel by night, on account of the Washington crowd... We’re just looking for some place to live... You’re welcome to come along, buddy, if you’ve got no home—or else we can drop you off closer to some town or another.”

The men of that caravan—thought Eddie indifferently—looked too mean-minded to become the founders of a secret, free settlement, and not mean-minded enough to become a gang of raiders; they had no more destination to find than the motionless beam of the headlight; and, like that beam, they would dissolve somewhere in the empty stretches of the country.

He stayed on the ladder, looking up at the beam. He did not watch while the last men ever to ride the Taggart Comet were transferred to the covered wagons.

The conductor went last. “Mr. Willers!” he called desperately.

“Come along!”

“No,” said Eddie.

The side-show barker waved his arm in an upward sweep at Eddie’s figure on the side of the engine above their heads. “I hope you know what you’re doing!” he cried, his voice half-threat, half-plea. “Maybe somebody will come this way to pick you up—next week or next month! Maybe! Who’s going to, these days?”

“Get away from here,” said Eddie Willers.

He climbed back into the cab—when the wagons jerked forward and went swaying and creaking off into the night. He sat in the engineer’s chair of a motionless engine, his forehead pressed to the useless throttle.

He felt like the captain of an ocean liner in distress, who preferred to go down with his ship rather than be saved by the canoe of savages taunting him with the superiority of their craft.

Then, suddenly, he felt the blinding surge of a desperate, righteous anger. He leaped to his feet, seizing the throttle. He had to start this train; in the name of some victory that he could not name, he had to start the engine. Moving past the stage of thinking, calculation or fear, moved by some righteous defiance, he was pulling levers at random, he was jerking the throttle back and forth, he was stepping on the dead man’s pedal, which was dead, he was groping to distinguish the form of some vision that seemed both distant and close, knowing only that his desperate battle was fed by that vision and was fought for its sake.

Don’t let it go! his mind was crying—while he was seeing the streets of New York—Don’t let it go!—while he was seeing the lights of railroad signals—Don’t let it go!—while he was seeing the smoke rising proudly from factory chimneys, while he was struggling to cut through the smoke and reach the vision at the root of these visions.

He was pulling at coils of wire, he was linking them and tearing them apart—while the sudden sense of sunrays and pine trees kept pulling at the corners of his mind. Dagny!—he heard himself crying soundlessly—Dagny, in the name of the best within us!... He was jerking at futile levers and at a throttle that had nothing to move... Dagny!—he was crying to a twelve-year-old girl in a sunlit clearing of the woods—in the name of the best within us, I must now start this train!... Dagny, that is what it was... and you knew it, then, but I didn’t... you knew it when you turned to look at the rails... I said, “not business or earning a living”... but, Dagny, business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible—that is the best within us, that was the thing to defend... in the name of saving it, Dagny, I must now start this train...

When he found that he had collapsed on the floor of the cab and knew that there was nothing he could do here any longer, he rose and he climbed down the ladder, thinking dimly of the engine’s wheels, even though he knew that the engineer had checked them. He felt the crunch of the desert dust under his feet when he let himself drop to the ground. He stood still and, in the enormous silence, he heard the rustle of tumbleweeds stirring in the darkness, like the chuckle of an invisible army made free to move when the Comet was not. He heard a sharper rustle close by—and he saw the small gray shape of a rabbit rise on its haunches to sniff at the steps of a car of the Taggart Comet. With a jolt of murderous fury, he lunged in the direction of the rabbit, as if he could defeat the advance of the enemy in the person of that tiny gray form. The rabbit darted off into the darkness—but he knew that the advance was not to be defeated.

He stepped to the front of the engine and looked up at the letters TT. Then he collapsed across the rail and lay sobbing at the foot of the engine, with the beam of a motionless headlight above him going off into a limitless night.

The music of Richard Halley’s Fifth Concerto streamed from his keyboard, past the glass of the window, and spread through the air, over the lights of the valley. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.

The lights of the valley fell in glowing patches on the snow still covering the ground. There were shelves of snow on the granite ledges and on the heavy limbs of the pines. But the naked branches of the birch trees had a faintly upward thrust, as if in confident promise of the coming leaves of spring.

The rectangle of light on the side of a mountain was the window of Mulligan’s study. Midas Mulligan sat at his desk, with a map and a column of figures before him. He was listing the assets of his bank and working on a plan of projected investments. He was noting down the locations he was choosing: “New York—Cleveland—Chicago... New York—Philadelphia... New York... New York... New York...”

The rectangle of light at the bottom of the valley was the window of Danneskjold’s home. Kay Ludlow sat before a mirror, thoughtfully studying the shades of film make-up, spread open in a battered case.

Ragnar Danneskjold lay stretched on a couch, reading a volume of the works of Aristotle: “... for these truths hold good for everything that is, and not for some special genus apart from others. And all men use them, because they are true of being qua being... For a principle which every one must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis... Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect...”

The rectangle of light in the acres of a farm was the window of the library of Judge Narragansett. He sat at a table, and the light of his lamp fell on the copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...”

The rectangle of light in the midst of a forest was the window of the cabin of Francisco d’Anconia. Francisco lay stretched on the floor, by the dancing tongues of a fire, bent over sheets of paper, completing the drawing of his smelter. Hank Rearden and Ellis Wyatt sat by the fireplace. “John will design the new locomotives,” Rearden was saying, “and Dagny will run the first railroad between New York and Philadelphia. She—” And, suddenly, on hearing the next sentence, Francisco threw his head up and burst out laughing, a laughter of greeting, triumph and release. They could not hear the music of Halley’s Fifth Concerto now flowing somewhere high above the roof, but Francisco’s laughter matched its sounds. Contained in the sentence he had heard, Francisco was seeing the sunlight of spring on the open lawns of homes across the country, he was seeing the sparkle of motors, he was seeing the glow of the steel in the rising frames of new skyscrapers, he was seeing the eyes of youth looking at the future with no uncertainty or fear.

The sentence Rearden had uttered was: “She will probably try to take the shirt off my back with the freight rates she’s going to charge, but— I’ll be able to meet them.”

The faint glitter of light weaving slowly through space, on the highest accessible ledge of a mountain, was the starlight on the strands of Galt’s hair. He stood looking, not at the valley below, but at the darkness of the world beyond its walls. Dagny’s hand rested on his shoulder, and the wind blew her hair to blend with his. She knew why he had wanted to walk through the mountains tonight and what he had stopped to consider. She knew what words were his to speak and that she would be first to hear them.

They could not see the world beyond the mountains, there was only a void of darkness and rock, but the darkness was hiding the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail. But far in the distance, on the edge of the earth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt’s Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was now to pronounce.

“The road is cleared,” said Galt. “We are going back to the world.”

He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.